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.

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View selected work

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

1. ### 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.

2. ### 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.

3. ### 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.

4. ### 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.

All posts →

- 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.

hello@example.com
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Free MIT template · Day 1 of 365

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