Founder
Jason Novek
I founded a YC startup -- OwnLocal, 2010 -- and have experience with backend, platform and applied AI engineering. Looking for Staff roles.
I founded a YC startup -- OwnLocal, 2010 -- and have experience with backend, platform and applied AI engineering. Looking for Staff roles.
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Experience
Health Harbor
Software Engineer, Applied AI
Software engineering, AI engineering and DevOps.
Built technology for AI-powered phone calls on the Vocode framework. Did substantial manual prompt engineering when... more many tools we use now were not mature enough for production. I've developed substantial intuition on how to prompt an LLM.
One challenging, recurring problem was extracting data from telephone transcripts which have a high mistranscription rate, especially from non-native english speakers. This required construction of robust end-to-end testing tools and a data set to challenge the LLM as we made updates.
I tested and selected the models that best met our needs while keeping costs under control.
I also owned Kubernetes (on Google's GKE) and surrounding infrastructure. We were a small team (2-4 engineers), so I touched everything — backend services, infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and system architecture.
Built technology for AI-powered phone calls on the Vocode framework. Did substantial manual prompt engineering when... more many tools we use now were not mature enough for production. I've developed substantial intuition on how to prompt an LLM.
One challenging, recurring problem was extracting data from telephone transcripts which have a high mistranscription rate, especially from non-native english speakers. This required construction of robust end-to-end testing tools and a data set to challenge the LLM as we made updates.
I tested and selected the models that best met our needs while keeping costs under control.
I also owned Kubernetes (on Google's GKE) and surrounding infrastructure. We were a small team (2-4 engineers), so I touched everything — backend services, infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and system architecture.
Fern Health
Software Engineer
Built small, fully serverless service-oriented architecture to back an AWS amplify project. Implemented a complex SAML integration coordinated with a very large partner. Managed... more backend infrastructure using IaC (terraform).
Self-Employed
Software Engineering Consultant
After OwnLocal I did a "tour" of about a dozen short-term consulting contracts with various companies to see broader examples of technology available. I learned to pick up... more new tools very quickly; as a result I've worked on topics as diverse as big data (hadoop), blockchain and electric car charging stations.
Founder and CTO
Founder and CTO.
I built the original product and grew the technical half of the house from just me to about 35 people.
I built the original product and grew the technical half of the house from just me to about 35 people.
The College of St. Scholastica
System Administrator
Sysadmin running real bare metal boxes! Those were the days.
I administered a few oracle databases, the campus's WebCT server and some misc BI oracle tools. Also COGNOS.... more Remember COGNOS?
I administered a few oracle databases, the campus's WebCT server and some misc BI oracle tools. Also COGNOS.... more Remember COGNOS?
Founder
Employee
Education
About
Achievements
Managing a growing dev team, setting a positive culture and convincing talented people to join you is hard. I'm proud that through those things, we've been able to establish ourselves as an organization dedicated to learning and advancement while continuing to deliver a product.
I never dreamed that I would be accepted into Y-Combinator, and am proud to be an alumnus of that organization.
Describe the most impressive thing you've done.
Skills