Jacob Zweifel

he/him

I build the backend platforms that keep mobile apps running for millions of people.

Write to me

always tinkering / builder of software systems / life-long learner / ask me about my dogs Boston area https://jzweifel.dev

Career

Over 15 years I've specialized in platform-level services at the boundary of mobile apps and distributed infrastructure: real-time event delivery, notification pipelines, and backend-for-frontend systems. At SimpliSafe I founded and led the App Services team from the ground up as a player-coach, then intentionally stepped back into a hands-on individual-contributor role to focus on what I love most: system design, architecture, and solving hard distributed-systems problems alongside a great team, but most importantly, solving real problems for real people. The services I've built and operate scaled with the company from ~1M customers to 5M+ people protected, moving tens of millions of real-time events and notifications a day.

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I'm an agilist at heart: extreme programming, test-driven development, and rapid feedback through continuous delivery. I treat what I don't know as an opportunity to learn, I openly mentor and share what I've accrued, and I expect the same generosity back from the people I work with. Lately that curiosity has extended to agentic AI tooling and decentralized protocols.

Open to
  • Full-time roles
  • Mentoring
  • Being mentored
  • Collaborations
  • Say hello →
  • 2019— Staff Software Engineer, Team Lead Simplisafe
  • 2018—2019 Agile Software Engineer Tribalscale
  • 2014—2018 Software Engineer Asynchrony Labs
  • 2011—2014 Programmer Analyst III, IS&T Washington University in St. Louis
  • 2011 IS&T Web Content Management - Temporary Full-time Washington University in St. Louis
  • 2010—2011 Web Services Missouri State University

Study

  • 2006—2010 Union High School High School Diploma

Skills

  • TDD
  • C#
  • Software Development
  • ASP.NET
  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • Web Applications
  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • JavaScript
  • CSS
+ 21 moreShow fewer
  • HTML
  • Jenkins
  • HTML 5
  • Windows 7
  • Office 2010
  • Visual Studio
  • Windows Server
  • Database Administration
  • NHibernate
  • Git
  • Databases
  • Powershell
  • Internet Information Services (IIS)
  • Lucene
  • SharePoint
  • Scala
  • Apache Kafka
  • Neo4j
  • Agile Methodologies
  • Representational State Transfer (REST)
  • JSON

Writing

Posts

  • Spending the weekend in California for Blizzcon! Very excited, seeing some friends I haven’t seen since the last one I attended in ‘19. Not to mention it will be a much needed break.

  • iPhone Duo looks neat! I’m a southpaw though, so a little apprehensive about the right-mounted control cluster. Unlocking with Touch ID seems like it’d be a little awkward. Maybe I’ll test drive it in-store one of these days.

  • November 5th for the Ocarina of Time remake!! Let’s goooo, it looks nice. Seems like they maybe aren’t doing anything unexpected with the story? 🤔

  • new Vulfpeck single day let’s goooo

    • Screenshot of the album art for Vulfpeck’s single The Beachcomber
  • Seems like a thrash kind of day. Doing morning routines to PetroDragonic Apocalypse and feeling ready to gooooo!

  • Thanks to @aturi.to's waypoints package, it was very easy to get a list of clients to display in this popover that I now have on my website. Instead of opening the composer only in Bluesky, you can now click to write a message in an app of your choosing!

  • Just totally mind blown seeing what folks are doing with Astra, as well as first hand. Some genuinely good starting points for website designs, much better than I’ve seen previous models do. and folks are creating 3D games with it now?! I gotta try that.

  • oh boy… looking forward to agentically automating my prediction market strategy soon!

8 of 18 · the rest on Bluesky ↗