Jake A. Smith

Remote (Seattle, WA)

Took CardPath, a goal-management platform, from concept to a released product, using AI coding agents to drive implementation. Personally built a code factory that took well-written product descriptions from the backlog to pull requests ready for review, with open work capped at 45 minutes of estimated human review time.

• Set the bar every coding agent built against, from layering and authorization to schema migrations, and turned each bug that slipped through into a new rule or an automated check.
• Built an MCP server for CardPath and secured it with OAuth 2.1 and per-tool permission checks, so each AI agent could act only within its user's permissions.

Remote (Seattle, WA)

Coach engineering leaders through IC-to-manager moves, managing underperformers, delivering bad news, and managing up to hit business goals. Also advise them on AI adoption, from outcome-first specs to a review agent shipped with the codebase, resulting in more effective teams and higher code quality.

Remote (Seattle, WA)

Owned Yahoo's primary content platform, effectively a headless CMS behind Yahoo Finance, Sports, Search, AOL, and HuffPost, used daily by thousands of editors and contributors. From 2021, also managed the team running the push notification platform, which served 7B+ notifications a day.

• Grew the org from 7 engineers to 41 across four managers, held it together through multiple M&A ownership changes, and developed three engineers into first-time managers.
• Made the case to VPs and the CTO for the roadmap, resourcing, and funding, and took Yahoo's GM through the tradeoffs between competing platforms.
• When HuffPost was sold, made the call to rebuild its content editor inside Yahoo's CMS; led a ~60-person extended team with product, design, and editorial to ship it in 13 weeks with zero downtime, zero bugs at launch, and no revenue impact.
• Cut an inherited CMS from dozens of revenue-impacting incidents a month to three or four minor incidents within a year, without pausing the roadmap.
• After the AOL–Yahoo merger, consolidated dozens of overlapping systems into one platform and moved AOL's brands onto it one at a time over two years.
• Directed an 18-month rebuild of three ingest paths and 40+ microservices into one multi-region AWS engine: 2x faster, with bug mitigation typically cut from hours to minutes.
• Ran the platform as a product for a few dozen internal verticals, with API and data contracts set early so teams built in parallel.
• Replaced per-team interviewing with one shared interview team and leveling bar, then took the model to peer organizations.

Remote (Orlando, FL)

Principal engineer on a publishing platform hundreds of engineers built on, which rendered AOL.com, Engadget, and Autoblog live at over a billion page views a month.

• From July 2016, led the platform's team as its architect: set the technical direction and defined what the team worked on.
• Led the modernization of the platform, which at peak ran 14 of the top 100 blogs on the open web: test coverage from zero to 90%+, full CI/CD, and engineering onboarding cut from days to minutes.
• Architected SHIELD, a Node.js OAuth 2.0/OIDC platform that became the standard auth layer for editorial tooling; still in production more than a decade later.
• Built the blue/green deployment tooling (pre-warming, scaling, fast rollback) that moved AOL.com, Engadget, and Autoblog from on-prem to AWS with zero downtime.
• Built the payments, payouts, analytics, and editorial review tools for AOL's Contributor Network, which opened Engadget and other brands to outside contributors, and set its security standards.

• Senior Software Architect at VMR Products
• Software developer and lead systems administrator at Company52
• Custom CMSs for web publications at StillThinkingHQ