I’m Jessica.

I’m an engineer. I’m an artist. I think the two are the same job at different scales.

I lead products end-to-end: discovery, code, design, the rooms where decisions get made. I’m the kind of engineer who reads the system before I write the spec, sits next to the user before I write the deck, and doesn’t hand off the parts I find boring. End-to-end means I do the email and the migration. It also means I shape the vision and bring the room with me: clients, board, investors, the team in the next chair. I’m trusted with the room because I take the trust seriously.

What I’m fluent in is AI. I lean on Claude the way a painter leans on a knife: not as the work, but as the tool that lets me move faster than the hesitation. I’ve shipped agentic systems, retrieval-grounded interfaces, and internal tooling that turns non-engineers into contributors to the codebase. The ambiguity of the moment (what should we build, who is it for, what does the model actually change about the answer) is the part I find most generative.

Outside the work, I paint in oil. I read Rilke and Auden and Kierkegaard. I love the absurdists; I think Camus had it right that the only honest answer to a meaningless universe is to make a meaningful one. I’m a Dostoevsky reader and a Gillian Flynn reader and the kind of David Foster Wallace reader who underlines on the second pass. Lynch, Fincher, Villeneuve, Sciamma, Coppola. Roger Deakins photographs the world the way I wish I could see it. I was an early subscriber to Every Frame a Painting, and I think Tony Zhou taught me as much about engineering as anything in CS.

I aspire to work that reads like Pentagram and feels like Apple: the kind of design where the seam vanishes and the thing knows what you wanted. I think for all the time we spend consuming, we should make. I think the urge to make a dent is the most human thing about us: not because we want power, but because we want proof we existed. I take that seriously.

Some specifics. My apartment is japandi-warm: maroon, navy, cream, oak. I love ikebana and Japanese delphinium and crepuscular rays through clouds and the way light bounces off rippling water at golden hour. I keep a sketchbook. I notice things, and I think the engineers I trust the most do too.

If we work together, you’ll get someone who treats taste as a technical skill, who shows up after launch, and who is excellent in the room. I’d rather sit with the people using the thing than write another deck about it.