Technical Founder | Staff Software Engineer
- Location: Chicago, IL
- Email: jesse.w.black@gmail.com
- LinkedIn: jessewblack
- GitHub: jesse-black
I build secure agentic development pipelines, backed by production-grade authN/authZ and rigorous engineering quality gates.
Agentic Engineering & Quality: AI Coding Agents (Codex, Jules), PR gates, CI/CD, E2E testing, Dev Containers, Testcontainers
Identity & Security: AuthN/AuthZ, OAuth2/OIDC, SSO, IdP, IAM, RBAC
Platform & Eventing: Azure, Terraform, Docker, event-driven systems (Event Hub/Kafka, Service Bus)
Ecommerce Integrations: App marketplace, OAuth apps, public developer API, Shopify, WooCommerce
Backend: Distributed systems, REST APIs, C#/.NET, Node.js, SQL Server, Redis
Frontend: TypeScript, React, micro frontends (MFE), Tailwind
Oct 2025 – present
Technical founder building an accessibility-first, AI-powered communication app with agentic engineering.
- Founded and built an accessibility-first communication app for Deaf professionals, combining real-time speech-to-text transcription (STT) for listening with high-quality text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) for speaking.
- Built saved responses and prototyped large language model (LLM)-powered smart replies, including one-tap playback, designed context-aware rewrites to fit the current conversation, and predictive suggestions based on partial input and conversation history.
- Implemented an Agentic Engineering workflow using AI coding agents with hardened dev/test sandboxes (Dev Containers, Testcontainers) and automated pull request (PR) quality-gate feedback loops for agent-generated changes.
- Bootstrapped a secure cloud stack on a self-funded budget using infrastructure as code (IaC) with Terraform, Microsoft Entra External ID for identity, and Azure SQL, optimizing for low burn during development while designing for scale at launch.
Nov 2022 – Oct 2025
Staff engineer building distributed event-driven shipment services and secure iOS micro frontend integration for fulfillment operations at scale.
- Architected and built a fulfillment center shipment service to track and manage shipping orders.
- Modernized shipping order ingestion using Event Hub (Kafka-compatible) and Service Bus to decouple from the monolith and enable tenantization and sharding.
- Enabled all engineering teams to embed micro frontends (MFE) in the iOS app with secure token transfer to enable seamless single sign-on (SSO).
- Strengthened CI/CD quality gates, adding containerized integration testing (Docker) and local database tests to improve end-to-end reliability.
- Mentored two Senior Software Engineers to Staff level.
Dec 2018 – Nov 2022
Senior engineer leading the IAM overhaul and App Marketplace integrations platform, raising the engineering quality bar with automated gates.
- Led team that overhauled and rebuilt the identity and access management (IAM) system using IdentityServer for OAuth2 and OpenID Connect (OIDC).
- Enabled fulfillment center managers to create and manage associate logins without time-consuming IT tickets.
- Removed IT-ticket-based user provisioning as a scaling bottleneck as ShipBob grew from dozens of fulfillment centers to hundreds.
- Led team that built a new App Marketplace using OAuth 2.0, a public Developer API, and integration with an iPaaS.
- Held weekly one-on-ones with engineers on the App Marketplace and IAM teams to support execution and career development.
- Delivered 6 app marketplace integrations with ecommerce storefronts (including Walmart and Wix).
- Introduced automated code-quality gates (SonarQube) on the App Marketplace team and enforced minimum 80% test coverage across the team's portfolio, achieving the highest overall test coverage in the engineering organization.
- Drove early adoption of C# 8 nullable reference types across the engineering organization, raising baseline code safety in new services.
- Developed and maintained access control systems using IdentityServer, OAuth 2.0 to secure access to Developer API.
- Developed and documented many endpoints in the ShipBob Developer API.
- Built the Developer API documentation system that aggregates OpenAPI specifications from multiple microservices into a single reference site.
Nov 2015 – Oct 2018
Digital consultancy engineer delivering custom .NET applications for enterprise clients.
- Built and delivered custom web and desktop applications for enterprise and nationally recognized private clients in a fast-paced consulting environment.
- Worked directly with client stakeholders to define requirements, estimate effort, and implement maintainable, scalable solutions on .NET and SQL Server.
- Deployed and supported .NET applications on Azure, including API and CMS-based solutions.
- Minor in Mathematics
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