# Jordan Zink

> Senior Software Engineer at Duolingo

Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/jordanzink

Software engineer with strong technical ability, drive for best practices and improvement, ability to brainstorm solutions to complex problems, and clear and effective communication. Educated at Carnegie Mellon University (SCS '15) with a degree in Computer Science and additional major in Robotics. Casual interests include roller coasters, AIs for games, traveling, German, and Rubik's Cubes.

Areas of software engineering I find particularly interesting include:
* Programming language related topics (static analysis, compilers)
* Software evolution (large scale code refactoring and health improvements)
* Service design and backend development
* Software architecture and best practices
* Robotics and computer graphics

I am generally not interested in front-end development as well as site reliability / DevOps roles.

## Work Experience
### Senior Software Engineer @ Duolingo
Jan 2022 – Present | Pittsburgh, PA
Service Delivery Team - Developer Amplification Area

Formerly: Architecture Team - Platform Area

### Software Engineer @ Two Sigma
Jan 2018 – Jan 2022 | Houston, Texas
Foundational Data Engineering team (4 years)

Worked on team responsible for critical data loading pipelines which ingested foundational financial data (e.g. prices, security master, etc) into the company for use by all trading models and back office operations. 30-40 team members, often divided into sub-teams of 5-10.

Languages: Java, Python, SQL, Bash
Select technologies: SQL Server, Jira, Git, Kubernetes/Docker, Jenkins

Select responsibilities:
* Involved in more than a dozen data pipelines. Work included researching vendor files and business partner requests to determine requirements, development of new pipelines, maintenance and improvement of existing pipelines, supporting pipeline operations, and deprecating pipelines when no longer needed.
* Seek ways to improve software quality and reduce operational risk. Innovated on CI/CD practices, especially driving development of integration testing. Sought consensus among software engineers on the team on how to best write software, from small issues like using local variable type inference in Java to large issues like whether or not to adopt code autoformatters.
* Participate in over a 1000 code reviews from teammates. Lauded for speedy and diligent reviewing with useful feedback.
* Handled L2 on-call support for the team one week every 3 months. Able to quickly investigate incidents, find root causes, and create patches to maintain speedy delivery of data.
* Mentored newer teammates. This includes teaching software engineers about the development environment and best practices as well as guiding data analysts on basics of software construction. Further spread knowledge by giving brown-bag style talks on many topics, such as Python’s asyncio library.
* Managed the team’s summer intern on two occasions, driving both to successfully complete projects which added value to the team. Both received return offers.

### Senior Software Engineer @ Applied Predictive Technologies
Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | Arlington, VA
Developed infrastructure systems on the Architecture team to support a core APT platform, including login and authentication, exception reporting, JobQueue system, user management, and internationalization. Development in Microsoft stack predominantly in C# with work in SQL Server, TypeScript, and other Microsoft technologies. Some exposure to deployment technologies, including Jenkins. Strong focus on code quality and best practices. Led internal company sessions target at engineers on a variety of topics, including API design, anatomy of requests within our platform, and practices around async/await behavior in C#.

### Head Course Assistant for 15-112 Fundamentals of Programming @ Carnegie Mellon University
Jan 2012 – Jan 2015 | Pittsburgh, PA
As Course Assistant, lead recitations and homework review sessions, held office hours where I help students with concepts and homework, grading tests and homeworks. As Head Course Assistant (F14 and S15), lead staff of 40 for class of 400+ students each semester. Duties included staff administration, hiring, grading rubrics and quality assurance, and extra lectures.

### Software Engineering Intern @ Palantir Technologies
Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Palo Alto, California
Backend developer for product team. Worked on integrating an external web API into search system, and also developed an API and implementation for new feature to search system.

### Application Development Intern @ JPMorgan Chase
Jan 2013 – Jan 2013
Java development for internal tools to aid in a tech refresh for an internal website.

### Web Development Intern @ MyCityWay
Jan 2012 – Jan 2012
Led a project to develop a HTML 5 version of native iOS app, using the Sencha Touch 2 framework. Also created demonstration mockups and worked with maintaining / expanding the company's API.


## Education
### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Jan 2011 – Jan 2015


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jzink-cmu

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Source: https://flows.cv/jordanzink
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jordanzink/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22