Jacob Zweifel

I build and operate the backend platforms in the critical path for SimpliSafe's entire app base, keeping mobile apps running for millions of people who depend on them to know their home is safe. I founded the App Services team in 2019 at the request of engineering leadership, growing it from 3 to ~9 engineers as both manager and hands-on builder, and setting the architecture and operational standards for every service at the mobile/app boundary. In 2024 I intentionally stepped back into a Staff individual-contributor role on the merged User Systems team to spend my time on system design, architecture, and the hard distributed-systems problems closest to real impact. A few of the systems I've built and own: - Real-time WebSocket platform: broadcasts ~93M events/day to connected clients, delivering alarm and system events with low latency; led the scalability redesign that lets it autoscale through peak load over Halloween. - Notification platform: built from scratch as the system of record for push, SMS, and email; now delivers ~70M push notifications/day (~25B/year) and ~1.6M SMS/day across APNs, FCM, and Twilio. - Mobile/web backend-for-frontend: serves ~39M API requests/day; led its migration to an EKS-based platform and a zero-downtime database migration to MongoDB Atlas. - Next-gen Communications Platform: took it from proof-of-concept to production, enabling product and engineering teams to create entirely new communications, shipping AI-generated alarm summaries, rich push, customer notification preferences, and SMS. I also try to lift the team around me: I founded a cross-team API guild spanning six platform teams, authored the deep-dive architecture references and onboarding guides people actually reach for, run engineering book clubs, and am usually the first call when something breaks. The through-line across six years: the platforms I've built scaled with the company from ~1M customers to 5M+ people protected.

Develop software leveraging a variety of technologies using Agile (kanban/extreme programming) methodologies with a strong focus on pair programming, acceptance-test/test driven development, and continuous integration/delivery. Lead focused learning sessions in 1-on-1, small group hands-on, and larger group presentation formats. Share learnings and collaborate with the community via open source contributions, blog posts, Meetup presentations. Duties include: * Incubating client engineering squads through pairing and coaching in XP and Agile Methodologies * Collaborating with cross-functional teams to uncover pain points and opportunities to deliver new business value through software, and mentored client anchors in managing portions of development project * Help client teams prototype and build new complex software to deliver on key product objectives * Experimenting with emerging technologies and understanding how they will impact what comes next. * Design, develop, test, deliver, maintain & improve cloud-native services and business applications; apply creative problem solving to bring designs to life using cutting edge technologies & techniques. * Coach teammates at lower levels * Participates in demos utilizing new technology

Develop solutions leveraging a variety of technologies using agile (kanban/extreme programming) methodologies with a strong focus on pair programming, acceptance-test/test driven development, SOLID, and continuous integration/delivery. Projects include: - Development of several tools for a major financial institution, including: ASP.NET/Knockout.js app for playback of training courses, an API used to expose training data, and microservices used to ingest an XML representation of a training "course", normalize and insert into a SQL backend, and expose to clients as JSON. Technologies include JavaScript, jQuery, Knockout.js, Razor, SASS, MVC/WebApi (ASP.NET), SQL Server, SQL Server Reporting Services, Lucene, Jenkins - A development/mentorship role with a media company. Primary goal was to help the team transform into an agile team, introducing their developers and business analysts to acceptance-test/test driven development, pair programming, kanban, and other agile methodologies, focusing on delivering a suite of Windows services responsible for ingesting an XML data structure and transforming it into the DDEX standard to modernize their supply chain. Technologies include .NET, RabbitMQ, WebApi, SQL Server, TeamCity, Chef - A Java-based development/mentorship role. Primary goal was to help the customer team deliver on a new RESTful service on time, while also introducing their developers to test driven development, pair programming, kanban, and other agile methodologies. Also aided the team in improving test writing skills, resulting in a wider, more robust test suite. Technologies include Java 7, Spring Boot, Hystrix, Oracle, Jenkins - a distributed real-time data retrieval system and data warehouse integration suite for a Fortune 500 company, including message stream processing, exposing RESTful and other APIs, and continuous integration plus delivery of microservices to AWS. Technologies include Scala, Kafka, Play, Akka, neo4j, AWS, Cloud Foundry, Jenkins