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Résumé

Adam Jahnke
València, Spain
email | phone | linkedin

Professional Summary

After 20+ years building the web, I've developed a genuine passion for JavaScript and front-end architecture. My journey has taken me from vanilla JS to modern frameworks and back again, giving me a comprehensive understanding of what makes excellent web applications. I've led teams through major technical transformations, created component libraries that developers actually enjoy using, worked across team and discipline boundaries, and mentored peers along the way. What drives me is crafting intuitive interfaces that solve real problems for users, while writing clean, maintainable code that stands the test of time.

Recent peer-feedback:

He's got great ideas, but is also legitimately excited to collaborate with others. This combination of skill and empathy means that pairing him with backend, design, or product folks is going to be a multiplier that yields a significantly better product.
(Q2 2025)

Adam models rare and much needed skills of a tech lead. He proactively lifts his peers and brings others along when evaluating technical decisions and trade-offs.
(Q3 2023)

Adam is a wonderful teammate. He has a lot of deep knowledge about how our systems work, yet he can explain it in simple terms so that someone with little context can understand it.
(Q1 2023)

Adam has had a huge impact on our culture, especially the FE team, and I think it really shows in how they work and continue to deliver really high quality work.
(Q2 2022)

...his ability to be vulnerable expressing what he doesn’t know and talking through possible solutions and outcomes is inspirational.
(Q4 2021)

Job History

Heavybit

Contracting Software Engineer
June 2025 — Present

  • Public-facing React site with content stored in Sanity.io
  • Internal data Application built with Vue and PostgresQL

Oilcan

Principal Software Engineer
March 2024 — June 2025

I joined Oilcan early, during their seed round, and began building features onto the existing Hotpot Ruby on Rails application, and getting some solid frontend foundations laid out before we expanded our team.

  • Implemented real-time updates in the application using Rails Turbo
  • Created new functionality and components within the app using Stimulus.js
  • Maintained and updated our component library built with ViewComponents and Lookbook
  • Built new data visualizations using D3.js
  • Transitioned plain ECMAScript usage to Typescript
  • Explored new possibilities for functionality with our product and design thinkers

Jeli/Pagerduty

Software Engineer
November 2020 — February 2024

As employee Nº 9, I lived out my favorite part of startup life - Wearing many hats and covering as many bases as possible, helping the team to adapt quickly to changing business needs and enabling rapid development, flexibility, and resiliency of our systems and eventually helping transition Jeli through an acquisition with PagerDuty.

  • Refactored and productionized the central API service (Node.js, Express, Apollo, TypeScript) in-place, implemented stricter type-safety, linting rules to help cement good practices
  • Architectural decisionmaking
  • Customer support
  • Implemented stricter type-saftety between the central API and the web interface (graphql-code-generator, Apollo, TypeScript)
  • Iteratively migrated front end from create-react-app with a home-grown deployment system to Next.js on Vercel
  • Custom data visualizations (React, D3.js)
  • Internal tooling (Node.js, Python)
  • Interviewing and onboarding new team members
  • Dependency upgrades

InVision

Senior Software Engineer, Lead Software Engineer
June 2018 – November 2020

I worked closely with the design team and led the charge to implement an "App Store" UI for third-party InVision Studio plugins. I refactored legacy code in the InVision Studio Electron application to better separate logical and presentation code, and created a better interface for user input. I was made team lead for our "design system" project in which I architected and organized a component library package to speed up development and increase the testability of our UI layer. I was certified as an "incident commander" in InVision's certification program.

  • New & existing feature development for InVision Studio (Electron, Node.js, TypeScript, React, Redux)
  • Development of the Studio App Store (TypeScript, React, GraphQL, Apollo)
  • Project lead, development of the Studio Design System (TypeScript, React, Storybook, Webpack, Tailwind, GitHub Actions)
  • Refactoring the Studio design tools (camera tools, keyboard shortcuts, user input)
  • Certified incident commander

Librato/SolarWinds

Front End Engineer, Senior Engineer
December 2013 – June 2018

I was fortunate enough to be hired to work with a bunch of data-visualization nerds at Librato (now AppOptics) when it was still in the startup stage. I did everything from API work, to front-end architecture, to developer tools there. I spent a lot of time tuning and maintaining large customer-facing applications, researching and selecting technologies for new projects, documenting developer best practices, and writing command-line tools for developer happiness.

  • Front end development, build process, architecture (webpack, Babel, React, Apollo, Redux, Backbone, Angular)
  • Ruby development (Rails, Sinatra)
  • Developer tools (Bash, Node.js, Docker, Vagrant)

Pure Charity

Developer
July 2011 – November 2013

At Pure Charity, I was hired to help build their online giving application with a focus on front-end technologies. We had very open roles in the company and I took that opportunity to begin working more with Ruby and Rails and owning features from top to bottom. After a year, I was promoted to the lead front end programmer and architect; a typical day for me there was building features of all shapes and sizes, providing support to other developers on the team, and spending time reviewing code to ensure that it adhered to best practices. I also discovered a passion for writing statistical and analytics tools for our business team, and for finding ways to automate tedious processes for the whole company.

  • All front-end development and architecture (Haml, Sass, CoffeeScript, AJAX, PJAX, JavaScript templating, Backbone)
  • Rails development
  • Ruby development and automation

Elevate, LLC

Developer
February 2005 – July 2011

I was hired as employee Nº 2 at Elevate, a web design and development startup, as an intern in high school. I organized copy and built the front ends for all of Elevate’s contract work. After graduating high school, I was promoted to lead developer and began working full-time. I worked very closely with the owner/designer and was challenged constantly to translate his designs into working interfaces that were functional and intuitive. Being a part of a very small company, I was stretched to learn about the business and develop the ability to teach myself and grow whatever skill was necessary to bring ideas and goals to fruition.

  • All front-end development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Sass, CoffeeScript)
  • Building and maintaining WordPress sites
  • Building and maintaining PHP sites using a custom content management system

Technologies

  • JavaScript
    • TypeScript
    • Hotwire
    • Webpack
    • Babel
    • React
    • Next.js
    • Apollo
    • XState
    • Redux
    • Gatsby
    • Backbone/Ampersand
    • Angular
    • CoffeeScript
    • jQuery
  • CSS
    • TailwindCSS
    • SCSS/Sass
    • Stylus
    • Less
    • styled-components
    • styled-jsx
  • Ruby
    • Rails
    • Sinatra
    • Jekyll
  • GraphQL
    • Apollo Server
    • Apollo Client
    • graphql-code-generator
  • Redis
  • PostgresQL
  • MySQL
  • AWS
  • Node.js
  • Electron
  • Darwin/*nix environments
  • Docker
  • Go
  • Python
  • PHP
  • HTML
  • Vagrant