Jake Swanson

Jake Swanson

Staff Engineer · backend systems, some frontend, lots of phone calls.

Atlanta, GA · (678) 719-9096 · jakswa@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/jakswa · github.com/jakswa

Experience

Staff Engineer, CallRail

Dec 2024 → Present · Atlanta, GA
Node.js, TypeScript, WebSockets, OpenAI Realtime, Twilio, Rails
  • Building AI Voice Assist: bridging Twilio voice streams with OpenAI's Realtime API over WebSockets — sub-second audio, barge-in handling, in production.
  • A decade of telephony concurrency translates directly to real-time voice failure modes. The institutional knowledge lets me debug a seven-year-old race condition the same afternoon I ship a new feature on top of it.
  • Operating as architect / reviewer / integrator — directing AI coding agents on implementation, owning the parts that have to be right.

Staff Engineer, Grayscale Labs

Oct 2022 → Dec 2024 · Atlanta, GA
Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, React, SMS pipelines
  • High-throughput SMS automation for recruiting — the kind of system where one bad query stalls a queue feeding live candidate conversations.
  • Owned the messaging pipeline through several traffic regime changes.

Staff Engineer, CallRail

Oct 2014 → Aug 2022 · Atlanta, GA
Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, AngularJS
  • Owned the code routing hundreds of thousands of daily phone calls, including the race conditions and concurrency bugs that come with it.
  • Rewrote the 2,000-line ERB + JavaScript tracking library distributed to customers, converting it to pure JavaScript with a comprehensive test suite.
  • Leveraged the new test suite to remove jQuery from the tracking library, dramatically reducing bundle size.
  • Progressed from full-stack AngularJS + Rails work to backend-focused systems development.

Stacks

voice_realtime
Twilio Media Streams, OpenAI Realtime API, WebSockets, sub-second audio pipelines, telephony concurrency
ai_workflow
Claude Code, Cursor, agent orchestration, AI-augmented review and architecture
languages
Ruby, JavaScript / TypeScript, SQL, HTML / CSS
frameworks
Rails, Node.js, React
infrastructure
PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Twilio

Projects

inkcap.click

Server-driven LLM chat app where the server owns durable conversation runs. Bun, Hono, PostgreSQL, SSR, SSE, MCP tools, and provider integrations.

marta.io

Real-time Atlanta train arrival dashboard built in Rust. Maintained for 10+ years.

home.jake.town

Personal home server. Hosts experiments, tools, and an AI familiar named Clatis.

Writing

Education

Georgia Southern University — B.S. in Computer Science, 2009 – 2011