Jake Gaylor

Staff Engineer | Product Leader

15+ years building and shipping products at scale—from founding SaaS ventures to architecting AI-powered platforms. I combine deep SWE expertise with business leadership to drive product vision, go-to-market strategy, and revenue growth.

Work

Cloaked Inc

– Present
Staff Product Engineer

Cross-functional force multiplier who solved infrastructure challenges, established the AI program, and built systems that enabled product, engineering, marketing, and executive teams to operate at their best

  • Transformed infrastructure by migrating to AWS EKS and implementing GitOps CI/CD that accelerated deployments by 30x

  • Established and led the company's AI program, developing autonomous agents with LangChain that became central to our product strategy and fundraising narrative

  • Built the data infrastructure and analytics pipelines that connected marketing, product, and engineering teams—enabling everyone to make metrics-driven decisions

  • Bridged product and engineering by creating a cross-functional ideation portal that unified teams around shared goals and transparent delivery

  • Partnered directly with co-founders and executives to turn strategic vision into technical reality, from AI-enabled onboarding to compliance frameworks

Inception Health

Staff SWE in Developer Experience (3rd engineering hire)

Built HIPAA-compliant infrastructure enabling team growth from 3 to 10+ engineers

  • Created CDK foundation with reusable compliance-ready constructs that let engineers deploy autonomously

  • Led transition of 250K MAU healthcare app from contractors to in-house, coordinating AWS, vendors, and hospital leadership

  • Established CI/CD for iOS/Android deployments while mentoring team on AWS and serverless patterns

Early Career Progression

Software Developer → Staff Engineer

10-year journey from research software to Staff-level platform engineering

  • Mississippi State (2010-2014): Won grants and built software tracking "human sensors" (social media users) during disasters like Hurricane Sandy

  • Food Service Warehouse (2015-2016): Early Kubernetes adopter—built production clusters when K8s was pre-1.0

  • Protectwise/Verizon (2016-2018): Operated 100+ node cassandra clusters and $10M+/yr AWS infrastructure at petabyte scale

  • Cardfree (2018): Modernized PCI-compliant payment systems handling millions in transactions

  • CyberGRX (2018-2020): Transformed deployment velocity through cloud-native CI/CD, having a cross-org impact accelerating product development

Projects & Ventures

View my technical projects and business ventures at https://jakegaylor.com/projects/

Skills

AI Engineering

  • LLM Agents
  • RAG
  • LangChain
  • Semantic Search
  • MCP Servers
  • Conversational AI

Platform Engineering

  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • GitOps
  • ArgoCD
  • Edge Infrastructure
  • Observability

Product Engineering

  • MVPs
  • Feature Development
  • Analytics
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • Polyglot

Product & Business

  • 0→1 Products
  • Product Market Fit
  • Strategy
  • Data Driven
  • Servant Leadership

References

References available upon request

Jake is a force for good unlike any other. He migrated our infra to a cheaper and more scalable system, crafted a CI pipeline that accelerated deploys by 30x, and taught the whole company how to make data-driven decisions by building and showcasing an entire product analytics stack. And that was just his first 6 months.

Director Platform Engineering, Cloaked

I watched Jake redo a build and deploy process over the span of 3 days, whip up a presentation, and get every engineer in the org up to speed using it to deploy new services, a moment I'll never forget because our productivity EXPLODED afterwards.

Software Engineer, CyberGRX

I also wanted to second (third? Fourth?) Jake's skills here. I don't have anything unique to add as everyone else has already covered it, but this man will help you achieve what you need.

Senior Platform Engineer, Inception Health