👋 Hey, I’m Jesse! I help lead Site Reliability at Runwise, where our team ensures the reliability, performance, and scalability of real-time energy management for 8,500+ buildings. Previously, I was part of the Ops team at 37signals as senior SRE building reliable, performant, and no-cloud solutions for HEY, Basecamp, and ONCE. Before that, I was senior manager of the SRE and QA teams at Realtor.com and lead performance engineer, solutions architect, and managed a kick-ass front-end development team at Cox Media Group. I work 💯 remote and love it!
Professional approach
Throughout my career I’ve focused on technical leadership, web performance, reliability and operational health, CI and test automation, usability & accessibility, development processes, and observability. The thread that ties all of it together is making complex systems understandable and reducing friction for both users and the people building the product. I care a lot about treating performance and reliability as user experience rather than just infrastructure metrics.
Technical execution only matters if it connects to human outcomes. Meaning, teams trust their systems, users value their interactions, and organizations can move fast because the foundations are solid. I’ve spent a lot of time bridging those gaps by translating observability data into actionable response and turning vague reliability concerns into measurable SLOs. I value quick iterration, while also taking the harder path and build systems with sane defaults. Automation and observability facilitate continuous improvement and clarity for responsiveness. The more durable solution is often the right one, even when it can take longer upfront.
The best teams and communities I’ve been part of were built by people who shared what they learned. Mentoring, meetups, open documentation, writing things down so the next person doesn’t have to rediscover it. That’s been a constant throughout my career, from hosting meetups, to just making sure the runbooks are up to date and actually helpful.
Balanced life
While I’m not working, I love spending time with my family, adventuring outdoors, playing tabletop or video games, broadcasting on Twitch, shooting photography and videography, or live-mixing video/audio. I’ve also spent some of my spare time working on personal and community projects, including co-hosting monthly tech meetups through Build Guild Atlanta and Morgantown, organizing with other tech folks in Morgantown at tech304.io, and serving as Chair of Public Art for the Arts Council of Greater Morgantown. I’ve got a growing list of long-term ideas and aspirations I’m working toward, from public art initiatives to STEAM education to a tech cooperative.
I also enjoy tinkering with new open-source projects in a homelab that doubles as a learning playground. All the stuff I’d want to practice before touching production. Honestly, half the things I’ve gotten good at professionally started as something I was just curious about at home and decided to try out or build.
Get to know me
Check out my work history and approach, or browse the writing archive for articles about technical work and personal interests. Say hi on Bluesky or Mastodon!