Jesse Jorgenson

Work

I’m a software engineer who builds software and technology of all kinds. My core strength is front-end engineering and software architecture, but most of what I do is shaped by whatever a project needs at the time. I’ve spent most of my career building for the web, and I’m increasingly drawn toward new areas like wearables and lower-level programming. I’ve also been working with AI tools over the last few years, adapting my skill set in a world where AI has become increasingly ubiquitous. Here’s the path that got me here.

History

2013 - 2017

My career began out of college as a support analyst for a company called Thunderhead.com. I quickly shifted towards becoming a software engineer and began working at FICO, where I developed my front-end development skills and grew a passion for JavaScript. I eventually evolved into a Fullstack engineer at FICO and I expanded my expertise to the back-end.

Wanting to shift my focus to large scale web applications, I began working at TicketCity.com as a web application engineer. My knowledge base expanded to include development operations and software architecture. My experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) grew rapidly and I was able to lead a large migration over to Docker. I also began working on a rewrite of a key application using React+Redux on the front-end and Node.js on the back-end.

During this time, I also began a side business called BuyerNeeds.com. Being the only engineer on BuyerNeeds, I learned even more about AWS and how to manage an application end-to-end.

Eventually, I realized I wanted to be involved in start-ups and I wanted to focus on companies with products that I resonated with. I then worked for a number of start-ups and I experimented with freelancing. I was also still working on BuyerNeeds at the time and continually learning all of the ins-and-outs of web applications.

2018 - 2022

I was living in Chicago in 2018 and after being burnt-out on the tumultuous life of early stage start-ups, I sought out a medium sized company based in Austin. This led me to a company whose product I had loved for years, Evernote. I was lucky enough to be hired by Evernote and began working on Evernote’s note editor.

At Evernote, I did a lot but here are some of the highlights:

  • I helped to rebuild the editor from the ground up to fix the foundations of the editor. This was a multi-year project and we were eventually able to completely replace the old editor. You can find out more about the new editor from this interview with Built in Austin.
  • I led the effort from the editor to build Collaborative Editing into the product. This required building nuanced bindings with Conflict Free replicated data types (CRDTs for short), building out the collaborative editing user experience in the note, helping to architect how collaborative editing worked end-to-end, and integrating this system with all of the Evernote clients.
  • I implemented Dark Mode in the editor. This required flipping arbitrary content from Light Mode to Dark Mode equivalents which became a standard way apps handled Dark Mode for user generated content (e.g. email clients like Gmail)
  • I implemented Templates. This includes working on templates syncing, the template manager user interface, working on the business logic in the back-end templates service, and working on the thumbnail generation of templates.
  • I migrated the entire build system to use Webpack from legacy systems (Google closure, raw bash scripts). This migration allowed for proper bundling which decreased the overall size of the editor drastically and greatly improved performance.

My time at Evernote greatly developed my skills as the size and complexity of the product was immense. Evernote had millions of active users and I had to help lead the technology that every user had to interact with. I had to develop a deep knowledge of everything related web technology and browsers.

In addition to working at Evernote, I also finished half of a Master’s Degree in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. My focus had been on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, including the study of Transformers which power large language models like ChatGPT.

However, I am currently on hiatus for a variety of personal reasons.

2023 - 2024

I left Evernote in March of 2023 after it was acquired and joined Jointly, an Austin-based startup reimagining how real estate transactions are managed. As a Senior Software Engineer I helped lead the frontend client as the user base grew — shipping new features quickly, strengthening the frontend architecture and paying down technical debt through major changes, eliminating performance bottlenecks, and standing up a comprehensive testing system so the app stayed stable while it kept evolving.

TypeScript, React, MobX, GraphQL/Apollo, Node.js.

2025 - Present

I joined Squint at the end of 2024 as a core engineer on the Web Portal — the app where manufacturers author and manage AI-generated procedures, and frontline operators run them on the factory floor.

Some of what I built and led:

  • Squint’s AI Copilot on the web — a chat assistant with responses streamed live over WebSockets.
  • The procedure “perform” engine (run lifecycle, autosave, conditional logic) and the Tasks system, end to end.
  • A dedicated business-logic layer that moved domain logic out of React and into unit-testable Jotai atoms — now the standard across the codebase.
  • A reworked data layer: caching, optimistic mutations, a migration off Firestore onto our own internal APIs, and a move to a much more modern state-transfer system, with some local-first capabilities added along the way.
  • Shared UI infrastructure — a virtualized table system, a custom PDF viewer, and a resumable media-upload pipeline.
  • A system of engineering standards and best practices designed to supercharge AI coding tools, getting the most out of AI-assisted development across the team.
  • Owning the release process and acting as a key reviewer for all Web Portal work, while mentoring engineers and interns.
  • A hack-week project mapping augmented reality into a browser-based VR experience, drawing on a deeper dive into AR/VR and web-based XR tooling.

TypeScript, React/Next.js, Jotai, TanStack Query/DB/Form, Tailwind CSS, WebSockets, IndexedDB, Vitest, Playwright.

In 2024 I also co-founded Axil, the work I care about most and want to be doing full-time. At Axil we build personal-data and personal-health applications around a simple principle: the user is the user, not the product. You own your data and decide how it’s used.

In practice that means living at the edge of client-side technology — local-first databases and sync engines, end-to-end encryption of personal data, offline-first UX, and wringing performance out of syncing large datasets to the client. We also help other teams tackle the same hard problems.

Our first product is DayDash, which we’re launching in 2026 — a place to bring all of your personal data together, draw insights from it, and build a deeper understanding of your health and wellbeing.

And in July of 2026, I’m joining Base Power. I’m passionate about the energy sector, home battery storage, and green energy, and I’m excited to spend my time building in that space.

Skills

General

  • Front-end engineering
  • Software architecture
  • UI/UX
  • Back-end engineering
  • Performance
  • Local-first & offline-first systems
  • Testing
  • Development operations
  • Developer Productivity
  • Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
  • AI-assisted development
  • Mathematics

Coding Languages

  • Typescript/JavaScript
  • Node.js
  • CSS (if you want to call it a language)
  • Python
  • Rust
  • Dart
  • C#

Libraries

Niche Skills

  • Rich Text Editing
  • WebAssembly
  • Local-first & offline-first sync
  • Streaming LLM / AI Copilot interfaces
  • AI-assisted development workflows
  • Collaboration and CRDTs
  • Input Method Editors (IMEs)
    • How users input data, usually with a keyboard
    • This becomes relevant for users that are typing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean as well as a variety of cases on mobile soft keyboards
  • Web views
    • How you embed web tech into native mobile and desktop applications
  • Clipboard/pasteboard
    • How you cut, copy, paste, drag, and drop across your operating system
  • Tricking Safari on iOS into doing the right thing even when it so badly wants to fail and get into a broken state
  • WebGL
  • AR / VR / XR
  • Geo Search
  • AI for robotics