# Jesse Swidler > Staff Software Engineer @ Observe Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jesseswidler I am an expert in building SaaS applications and cloud infrastructure with a passion for good user experience and design. I have worked as an engineer and team lead at some of the most innovative Silicon Valley startups, including Okta, Udacity, AKASA, and Fortify. I have a lot of experience with backend and frontend technologies and languages, such as AWS, Google Cloud, Go, Java, Node.js, Kubernetes, Postgres and Elasticsearch, just to name a few. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Observe, Inc. Jan 2023 – Present | San Mateo, California, United States ### Chief Technology Officer @ Ginkgo Software Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States We were a small venture backed company that set out to create an all-in-one platform for agencies which specialize in providing services for people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (I/DD). Our application had note taking functionality along with the ability to schedule of both employees and clients. Our big differentiator was authorization tracking for the services which people with disabilities use and are paid for by the state in real time. This allowed agencies to see how many hours or services their clients had used and remaining within each pay period, allowing them to optimize their business in a way that is difficult with other software on the market. Our clients also frequently commented on the quality of the frontend experience compared to competitors. Despite getting some initial traction and users, we were unable to secure additional funding or a satisfactory acquisition offer. I was involved in all aspects of the business, from customer acquisition and relations, product management, engineering, hiring, and more. The tech stack used a few Google Cloud services like Storage and Google Cloud Run (GCR), Go, Typescript, React, Postgres, and Elasticsearch. ### Senior Software Engineer @ AKASA (formerly AlphaHealth) Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area I created a web application for labeling data used by AI algorithms. The application allowed machine learning researchers and AI driven programs to create labeling tasks via API call. The tasks were put into different queues for humans that worked at AKASA to process. The different queues allowed people with different qualifications to work on different tasks. Developed an authentication and permission service and framework for internal users and applications. Users and apps could be registered and configured from a centralized web UI Both projects mostly used Go for the backend, Typescript + React for the frontend, and Postgres for storage. The auth framework could be used by internal services as a Kubernetes sidecar, and internal applications used Python packages where required to make using the functionality of both programs easier. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Udacity Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area Technology I created at Terminal has been repurposed to manage a large number of virtual machines that students use while completing coursework. Embedded into lessons at Udacity are "workspaces", which can put things into the browser such as Jupyter Notebooks, an IDE, a SQL interface, 3D simulations, and more. Each workspace includes custom files depending on the lesson, and work is persisted for students between sessions. Some workspaces have GPUs attached required for machine learning. Over 500,000 virtual machines are provisioned to students each week through this system. I designed and built the workspaces backend for provisioning, file persistence, automatic assignment grading, the secure network layer, and more. I've also built other large classroom features for Udacity, such as a spaced repetition (flashcard) feature. Some of the main technologies being used are Go, Node.js, Java, NGINX, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, AWS, GCP, React, and Python. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Terminal.com Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area Terminal.com hosted a service that allowed people to easily get computers in the cloud that generally included a collaborative IDE and other tools for sharing. Our original offer targeted many different kinds of users including developers and data scientists, but users in the education space such as university professors and online universities including Udacity and Codecademy used our services and requested additional features for their own needs. Eventually we decided to refocus exclusively on educational use cases. We discovered that the technology behind online classrooms had not advanced far beyond videos and text, and we believed that more interactive learning environments could be created that would encourage people to create better online courses that students would enjoy more while learning faster. We were contracted by Udacity to customize our existing collaborative IDE tech for their online courses, which turned out to be a huge success - reportedly increasing the rate that students would complete a course by 3X! On the back of this successful partnership, the company was acquired by Udacity. ### Principal Software Engineer @ Okta, Inc. Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 I joined Okta when they had fewer than 10 customers and about 5 engineers building the product, and stayed with them through a hyper-growth phase. I helped develop core tech and features that were important to establishing the company and practices so it could become what it is today. I established and led the performance team during a critical time, and followed up with establishing and leading the security infrastructure team; again at a time where there was critical need for such a team. The performance team was the largest with 5 other engineers on it. ### Software Engineer II @ HP / Fortify Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Foster City, CA I worked on Fortify SCA - Static Code Analyzer. This software scans code for security vulnerabilities, and requires a good understanding how code and exploits work across many domains. I developed and maintained compilers for over 20 computer languages, which allowed our program to analyze many computer languages by translating them to a common syntax tree which could be scanned for issues. During my time here, I worked closely with security researchers and reviewed thousands of security vulnerabilities reported by our program. I consulted on the output from the analyzer on many different code bases, which has given me an appreciation for the different ways platforms can be built and especially how to write safer code. ### Software Engineer @ ERDAS / Leica Geosystems Jan 2001 – Jan 2005 | Atlanta, GA I began at ERDAS as part of a coop program through Georgia Tech and worked there for several years. My work at the company was mostly on a tool called VirtualGIS which is or was a part of ERDAS Imagine, a suite of tools for analyzing aerial or satellite photographs. This tool displayed the images in 3D and allowed a Google Earth kind of view for engineers and analysts. I implemented joystick drivers, 3D file importers including VRML and 3D Studio, and helped implement animation tools. Another responsibility of mine was to produce nightly builds and maintain the installer for Stereo Analyst, a plugin for ArcGIS. If the build failed, I would diagnose the reason why. ## Education ### Bachelor of Computer Science in Computer Science Georgia Institute of Technology ### Machine Learning Nanodegree in Artificial Intelligence Udacity ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jesseswidler --- Source: https://flows.cv/jesseswidler JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jesseswidler/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01