Available for selective contract work · Brooklyn, NY
Jordan Reyes. Building tools that other engineers actually want to use.
Backend-leaning full-stack engineer focused on developer experience, build pipelines, and the parts of a product nobody screenshots. Currently senior software engineer at Lumen Labs.
About
I'm Jordan, a senior software engineer based in Brooklyn. I've spent the last decade shipping infrastructure, internal platforms, and the occasional user-facing product at companies between five and five hundred engineers.
My favorite work sits at the boundary between build systems and the people using them — type-safe data layers, hermetic CI, deploy pipelines that fail loudly and recover quickly. I believe most "performance problems" are actually clarity problems wearing a costume.
Currently a staff engineer at Lumen Labs working on developer platform. Open to selective contract work and conference talks. Not looking for a new full-time role right now.
Tools I reach for
- TypeScript
- Go
- Distributed systems
- Build tooling
- Continuous integration
- Developer experience
- PostgreSQL
- Observability
Selected work
Things I’ve shipped recently.
-
2024 · Tech lead
A remote build cache that turned 22-minute CI into 4 minutes
Designed and shipped the remote build cache that took our monorepo from a 22-minute median pipeline to 4 minutes, while staying within our existing GitHub Actions runners.
Median PR pipeline 22 min → 4 min. Cache hit rate 71% sustained. ~$18k/mo of CI compute reclaimed.
- Bazel
- Go
- TypeScript
- GitHub Actions
- S3
-
2022 · Senior engineer, infrastructure
Cutting p95 latency 40% by moving auth to the edge
Moved session validation and per-request authorization to a Cloudflare Worker tier in front of the origin. Same correctness contract; far less work for the application layer.
Authenticated p95 latency 312ms → 187ms. p99 cut by 38%. Origin egress dropped 22% as a side effect.
- Go
- Cloudflare Workers
- Redis
- PostgreSQL
- OpenTelemetry
-
2023 · Author and maintainer
Quill: a tiny config-loader nobody asked for that 2.4k people now use
A 4kb TypeScript library for loading typed configuration from env vars + JSON/YAML overlays, with a test mode that catches missing keys at build time. Open source, MIT, no telemetry, no opinions about your runtime.
2.4k weekly downloads. 38 contributors. Used in production at three companies I know of and probably more I do not.
- TypeScript
- Vitest
- tsup
- Changesets
- GitHub Actions
Experience
-
Staff Software Engineer, Developer Platform · Lumen Labs
2023 — Present
- Owns the internal CI/CD platform used by ~120 engineers across 9 product teams.
- Cut median pipeline runtime from 22 minutes to 4 minutes by introducing remote build caching and Bazel-style action graph hashing.
-
Senior Engineer, Infrastructure · Northwind Studios
2020 — 2023
- Led the migration of the monolith to a service mesh on Kubernetes without a customer-visible incident.
- Designed the multi-tenant feature flag service used by every product surface; now serves 40k req/s at p99 < 8ms.
-
Software Engineer · Atlas Systems
2018 — 2020
- Shipped the first version of the customer data export pipeline; still in production five years later.
- Reduced AWS spend 31% by right-sizing reserved capacity and consolidating staging clusters.
-
Junior Engineer · Field & Pine Co.
2016 — 2018
- First engineering hire. Built the Rails monolith that eventually got migrated away from (sorry).
- Wrote the original deploy scripts. They were bash. They were fine.
Writing
Notes from the build log.
-
Mar 14, 2026
Measure before you cache
A short essay on the most expensive engineering mistake I have made repeatedly: assuming I knew where the time was going.
-
Jan 22, 2026
Why I stopped writing RFCs (and what I write instead)
After ten years of formal design docs, I changed the format. Here is what I do now and the kind of decisions it tends to produce.
Speaking
-
StaffPlus NYC, 2025
The boring layer underneath every fast deploy
-
LeadDev London, 2024
Hermetic CI without the religion
Contact
Got something hard you’re trying to ship? Let’s talk.
Best way to reach me is email. I read everything; I reply to anything specific.