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.