Jason Reid Minard - Technology Miracles

Professional Experience (SummaryLeadershipEngineeringProductOpen-Source)

This is a condensed version of the original, please visit https://www.jaysonminard.com to view role-specific versions in Leadership, Engineering, Product Management, and Open-Source.

May 2025 - present
Applied AI @ rumble.com (contract)

Rumble is a video sharing platform with over 100 million active monthly users, founded in 2013.

Leading modernization of ML/AI systems across discovery, ranking, recommendations, and real-time personalization. Took ownership of underperforming efforts, rebuilt them from the ground up, and delivered measurable value for users and the business.
A hands-on technical leadership role, architecting and delivering scalable ML/AI systems that drive discovery, ranking, recommendations, and personalized experiences across the video sharing platform.
- Data: Revamp data engineering into a continuous pipeline from source data through derived data for various target platforms.
- Behavioral: Improved the precision and utility of user behavior tracking, aligning it with the needs of downstream pipelines.
- Scalability: Designed a multi-tier data architecture to balance long-tail retention, emerging trends, and short-session real-time response. Tuned GPU usage across local and remote resources for utilization and cost-efficiency.
- Technology: Strengthened the data platform’s Kubernetes architecture, added feature and vector stores, introduced CDC and durable event flow, enhanced OpenSearch for text and vector queries, and integrated NVIDIA Merlin for recsys workloads.
- Observability: Built deep observability into all stages of the pipeline, monitoring freshness, transformation, and drift.
Open-source used within our technology stack includes:

Technology stack centered around:
- OpenSearch
- Qdrant
- FAISS
- NVIDIA Merlin
- Hugging Face Transformers
- PyTorch
- Redis / KeyDB
- MySQL
- Clickhouse & StarRocks
- Parquet & Iceberg
- Kubernetes
- MinIO
- Kafka / Redpanda
- Apache Spark
- Ray
- VictoriaMetrics & Logs
- Python
- Kotlin w/Quarkus
Driving AI innovation through scale, speed, and user relevance

Rebuilding ML/AI from the ground up to support platform-wide discovery and personalization

L E O
Jul 2021 - present
Director of Technology @ locals.com (contract)

Locals is a creator crowdfunding and social community site founded in 2019, and acquired by Rumble in 2021

As technology leader, I set the strategic direction for technical teams, delivering major improvements in scalability, security, observability, and modernized our infrastructure.
In a technology leadership role, I revamped our use of technology with a hands-on approach, including:
- Scalability: Introduced scalable system design patterns. Assumed production DBA responsibilities, performance tuning and better database usage patterns for scale.
- Cloud: Migrated from AWS (EC2/ECS/S3) to OpenStack / Kubernetes private cloud in multiple data centers. Automation with Pulumi.
- Modernization: MySQL 5 to MySQL 8. Consolidated multiple web UIs into a new unified codebase based on Solid-JS. Implemented new search system with OpenSearch.
- Security: Cloudflare edge and DDoS protection, system and network hardening.
- Observability: Prometheus/Sentry/PMM monitoring stack and built custom real-time MySQL performance analysis and emergency tooling.
Contributions to Solid-JS, Solid-Start, Quarkus, and various Kotlin open-source frameworks.

Scaling from startup to acquisition by rumble.com

Scaling to tens of millions of active users, acquired by rumble.com

L E O
2017 - 2022
Director @ sort.dev

Director and Principal Engineer @ sort.dev

Delivering innovative technology solutions for top-tier clients.

Open-source used within our technology stack included:

Solving complex technical challenges for consulting clients. Technology stacks centered around:
- Elasticsearch ﹠ OpenSearch
- Apache Spark ﹠ Flink
- Hadoop ﹠ HDFS
- MySQL ﹠ PostgreSQL
- AWS ﹠ Azure
- Kafka
- Java ﹠ Kotlin ﹠ Scala
- JavaScript ﹠ TypeScript
- Quarkus ﹠ Vert.x
Key Clients: (related to filter)
1. Jul 2021 - Dec 2021
  locals.com
  
  Audited the company's technology, establishing priorities and a plan to enhance performance, scalability, security, operations, and management.
  
  Analyzed user-facing applications and infrastructure, prioritized reducing technical debt to allow future overhauls, and focused on performance, scalability, security, observability, and management.
2. Aug 2020 - Jul 2021
  Apple
  
  Worked on team improving iCloud storage efficiency via erasure encoding, specialized JVM garbage collectors for team-specific workloads, and contributed to Hadoop/HDFS for better Kubernetes integration.
  
  Contributed to Hadoop (HDFS) ecosystem to improve HDFS running within Kubernetes.
3. Jul 2019 - Oct 2021
  TheoremOne
  
  Led the interview content development and evaluation teams. Designed the interview process, technical screening processes, and practical exercises for senior level candidates.
  
  Optimized their front-of-the-funnel filters and practical exercises for senior level technology candidates. Emphasizing fairness and realistic situations when applied to each role.
  
  Built an introspection framework that can measure the type of changes made between failed unit test runs covering most major languages.
  
  Created an open-source framework for SQL testing allowing detection of partial solutions, and levels of correctness and optimality.
4. May 2017 - Jul 2020
  Karat
  
  Served on the interviewer management team, overseeing quality control after rebuilding processes and standards for interviewer evaluation and candidate experience.
  
  Designed high quality interview content for first and second round interviews with a high predictive correlation to the candidate's performance in final interviews.
  
  As part of the content team, developed new interview formats to help broaden the interviewing product for clients with more demanding and varying needs. For the CX (candidate experience), focused on improvements to the product delivery to improve their experience, along with accuracy and fairness.
5. Jul 2017 - Jul 2018
  EBSCO
  
  High scale data engineering project focusing on data ingestion and transformation from many sources into derived data lakes.
  
  Implemented a custom XML-to-JSON and JSON-to-JSON transformation engine using zero-copy memory structures to avoid duplication during structural and format changes. Transforms were applied as logical transactions until being applied during stream rendering of the final result. This dramatically reduced pressure on the JVM garbage collector.
6. Mar 2017 - Jul 2017
  P&G
  
  Pilot project trialing P&G first entry into the cloud, specifically AWS. Implementing process controls and standards, and automation across various AWS services. Built a demo application of data processing with Kafka as a showcase.
Other Clients:
- locals.com 2021
- Apple 2020 - 2021
- TheoremOne 2019 - 2021
- Karat 2017 - 2020
- EBSCO 2017 - 2018
- P&G 2017
- Gradle 2017
- Globant 2017
- Tokopedia 2017
- CityScoring 2017
Engineering consultancy: technology & talent

L E P O
May 2014 - May 2017
Founder, CTO, and Product @ Collokia

Developed ML-powered tools to analyze IT professionals' collective experience, eliminating repeated mistakes and accelerating learning by surfacing relevant knowledge directly in their work environment.

Led technical and product teams to deliver a successful and comprehensive product. A key partner with the CEO in funding the company through successive rounds.

Also served as product manager, leveraging both roles to build a successful product that met enterprise knowledge management needs while seamlessly integrating into IT professionals' daily workflows.

Contributions to Elasticsearch, Flink, Netflix Graph (fork), and various Kotlin open-source projects.

Open-source used within our technology stack included:

Some of the technologies we use to accomplish this include:
- Elasticsearch
- Apache Spark ﹠ Flink
- NLP ﹠ ML (JVM toolkits)
- Vert.x ﹠ Apache Ignite ﹠ Hazelcast
- MySQL ﹠ Cosmos DB
- AWS EC2, ECS, S3, Kinesis, Presto, …
- Azure Compute, EventHubs, DataLake, Analytics, …
- Kotlin ﹠ JavaScript ﹠ C#
- Plugins for: Eclipse, Intellij, VisualStudio, Gradle, Maven, SBT, Jenkins, Bamboo
- Chrome and Firefox browser extensions
Machine-learning startup acquired by Globant

L E P O
Jan 2006 - May 2014
Director @ Bremeld (Uruguay) ﹠ MindHeap (Canada)

Director and CTO @ Bremeld (Uruguay) ﹠ MindHeap (Canada)

Delivering innovative solutions for clients focused on search and linguistics, big data, data engineering, open-ended scaling, and systems development.

Contributed to Solr, Elasticsearch, Kotlin, and many other open-source projects.

Solving complex technical challenges for consulting clients focused on scalability, search and linguistics, big data, data engineering, and systems engineering. Technology stacks centered around:
- Elasticsearch ﹠ Solr ﹠ Lucene
- Endeca
- Cassandra
- MySQL ﹠ PostgreSQL
- SQL Server ﹠ Oracle
- Titan Graph ﹠ Neo4j
- AWS
- Java ﹠ Kotlin ﹠ Scala
- JavaScript ﹠ Python
Key Clients: (related to filter)
1. Jan 2013 - Dec 2013
  Prezi
  
  Led team focused on using Machine Learning to automatically create presentations on known topics.
  
  Working in linguistics, search and information retrieval, recommendations, semantic understanding, disambiguation, and other fun topics to automatically create presentations on behalf of users.
  
  Contributed to early Kotlin and relate dopen-source frameworks.
1. Feb 2008 - Oct 2012
  Serials Solutions ﹠ ProQuest
  
  Summon won the 2011 CODiE Award for Best Enterprise Search Solution by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). Responsible for architecture and leading development for Summon since the proof of concept.
  
  Lead the technical team building a billion+ record search system with requirements for high precision and strong linguistics across many world languages (Latin, Cyrillic, CJK).
  
  Contributed to distributed search for Solr search engine.
1. May 2007 - May 2008
  Endeca ﹠ Boeing
  
  Designed an addon product for Endeca called "Mindeca", allowing federated search across disparate Endeca search systems. This included a desktop schema management tool, a federation layer, and search middleware. Used principally within Boeing to search 50+ partner databases within MyBoeingFleet.
  
  Built a federation layer and middleware on top of Endeca for searching 50+ partner databases within MyBoeingFleet.
1. Jan 2006 - Aug 2006
  Zend Technologies
  
  Editor-in-Chief and product manager for Zend Developer Zone, a community website supporting professional PHP developers. Product manager for Zend Framework open-source project. Also acted as conference chair for the 2006 Zend PHP Conference.
  
  Product manager and interim lead for the PHP based Zend Framework open-source project.
  
  Kick-started key parts of the PHP based Zend Framework open-source project.
Other Clients:
- Renaissance Learning
- Prezi
- ProQuest
- Serials Solutions
- Plum Analytics (EBSCO)
- Endeca
- Boeing
- AbeBooks (Amazon)
- Alibris
- Zend Technologies
- Unfuddle
- LibraryThing
- SitterCity
- UrtheCaste
- SheetMusicPlus
- TinyMassive
- Quandl
- JobMagnet
- Tim Group
- Decooda
- Exclaim
- Aptus
- Gossamer Threads
- Oprius
Award-winning consultancy in search systems and big data

L E P O
Jun 2003 - Apr 2007

CIO and CTO @ Abebooks (amazon.com)

At the time, AbeBooks was the world’s largest marketplace for books with over 125 million books from 14,000 suppliers around the world operating localized sites in North America, Australia, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany and Italy.

As CTO, I led technology strategy and executive decision support. Acted as Chief Software Architect redesigning the system for scalability and reliability. Improved technical hiring, and mentoring of development resources.

As CTO, I led technology strategy and executive decision support. As CIO, I directed all technology functions including IT, Operations, Development, Program Management, and QA. Managed the IP portfolio and licensing, vendor relationships, PCI compliance, and technology budgets.

Under my dual role as CTO/CIO, I established the product management organization before transitioning it to dedicated VP of Product Management.

$125M GMV marketplace acquired by Amazon.com

L E P
Dec 2002 - May 2003

Director, Product Management @ BEA Systems (Oracle)

Short term contract working to drive home the first unified platform release of WebLogic (8.1); working with the teams developing BEA Workshop IDE and associated tooling for platform components.

Contract shepherding critical platform release

P
Dec 2000 - Dec 2002

Chief Architect, Java Business Unit @ Borland

An architect at Borland acts as technical program manager as well as driving the technology base and decisions of products within their domain. In this role, I defined the strategy for products within the Java Business Unit, including for the JBuilder IDE, related frameworks, and influenced the direction of Java itself.

As Chief Architect, I was a member of the executive staff of the Java Business Unit. Led the JBU in strengthening our market position and extending our competitive advantage while leading the technical program management and development teams.

Acted as Director, Technical Business Development during a management team transition. Managed corporate-wide partnerships, IP and patent licensing, acquisition technical due diligence and research. One key acquisition was of TogetherSoft for USD $185 million.

Overall lead for the Java products division of the company. Senior Staff engineer working on the Java based JBuilder IDE and also the company-wide Sanctuary software licensing system. Participated in Java standards development in conjunction with Sun Microsystems.

I was the original creator of the JBuilder IDE during a previous stint at Borland

JBuilder, the leading commercial Java IDE 1997 - 2003

L E P
Dec 1998 - Dec 2000

Founder, CTO, and Product @ OpenAvenue

OpenAvenue pioneered web-based collaboration for hybrid software teams, creating a new model for seamless integration between internal, outsourced, and open-source developers.

As CTO and product lead, shaped product strategy and pioneered a hybrid commercial/open-source business model that encouraged enterprise contribution to open-source development.

Founded and led company through seed and round A funding. Transitioned to product/technical leadership alongside new CEO, partnering with co-founder VP of Engineering to drive product strategy.

OpenAvenue showcased the very first model of a "pull-request" style feature with its "baselines and submissions" model of development.

We were also the stewards of the CVS (version control system) open-source project.

Devtools startup acquired by StarBase and later by Borland

L E P O
Oct 1995 - Nov 1998

Sr. Staff Engineer, JBuilder Architect @ Borland

Created the JBuilder IDE, taking it from concept to market-leading product. Changed the original team direction from C++ addons towards a Java centric powerhouse.

Created the JBuilder IDE, originally as a side project JAyVA, and later as the core focus of the team. Using a mix of Delphi and Java, created a new model for UI development with direct code interpolation and manipulation without special form files. Advanced from Engineer IV to Sr Staff Engineer leading core IDE development. Also contributed to Borland C++ and Delphi.

Patented the concept for modern integrated development environments setting a direction for the industry, netting over USD $200 million in patent licensing. Influenced the direction of Java working with Sun Microsystems on key Java specifications.

From JAyVA to JBuilder, creating the leading Java IDE

E P
Dec 1994 - Oct 1995

Sr. Consultant @ Greenbrier & Russel (Fujitsu Consulting)

Teaching and consulting in the client-server heyday

E
Oct 1993 - Dec 1994

Technical Director @ DPSC

Technical leadership and management in systems engineering (acquired)

L E
July 1992 - Oct 1993

Founder and Lead Engineer @ Dvorak Development

Created ForCIS CompuServe navigator, which became the basis of the NavCIS product at Dvorak Development. We invented the concept of fonts, colors, and emojis in electronic messages.

Created ForCIS CompuServe navigator in FORCE, which became the basis of the NavCIS product for DOS and Windows written in C++ and Assembly.

NavCIS: the first ever WYSIWYG messaging system (acquired)

L E P
Sep 1991 - Jul 1992

Systems Software Engineer @ Annatek (Novell)

Automated file distribution system (acquired)

E
Sep 1990 - Sep 1991

Software Engineer @ Sophco

FORCE xBase language and runtime development (acquired)

E
Jun 1988 - Sep 1990

Technology Director @ Restaurant Runners

Order and dispatch system for the pioneer of food delivery

E
Jul 1986 - Sep 1990

Independent Contracting

Early career in software development

E

Applied AI @ rumble.com (contract)

Director of Technology @ locals.com (contract)

Director @ sort.dev

Director and Principal Engineer @ sort.dev

Founder, CTO, and Product @ Collokia

Director @ Bremeld (Uruguay) ﹠ MindHeap (Canada)

Director and CTO @ Bremeld (Uruguay) ﹠ MindHeap (Canada)

CIO and CTO @ Abebooks (amazon.com)

Director, Product Management @ BEA Systems (Oracle)

Chief Architect, Java Business Unit @ Borland

Founder, CTO, and Product @ OpenAvenue

Sr. Staff Engineer, JBuilder Architect @ Borland

Sr. Consultant @ Greenbrier & Russel (Fujitsu Consulting)

Technical Director @ DPSC

Founder and Lead Engineer @ Dvorak Development

Systems Software Engineer @ Annatek (Novell)

Software Engineer @ Sophco

Technology Director @ Restaurant Runners

Independent Contracting