Jake Neal

Fifteen years shipping software across the stack: games in the iOS and Android stores, a media-tech company I founded, product engineering at a cybersecurity firm, seven years as the observability architect in the war rooms of the internet's largest sites, and now AI agents and data applications at Snowflake. I use coding agents throughout my workflow and know which points still need a human. I'd like to build that kind of product for everyday people — and I know what it takes to keep one running in production.

15 yrssoftware development, full-stack from day one
10 yrssoftware design & architecture — startup, security, observability, data/AI
3×conception → launch: App Store games, BoostLegal, Praetorian products
Top 10ranked AI user at Snowflake, company-wide
4promotions in five years at New Relic

What I'd bring to Caldo

Business need → working system Product innovation

At Snowflake I sit between business stakeholders and engineering: I take what a bank or the military actually needs and turn it into AI-agent (MCP) architectures and semantic models they can trust. Same job Caldo has — translating a person's goal into something an agent can act on.

Blank page to shipped Navigating ambiguity

Founded a company, wore product/engineering/customer-success hats at Praetorian, and walked into hundreds of undefined customer problems at New Relic. I don't wait for a spec — I build the first version across the stack, put it in front of people, and drive to a decision.

Observability before launch Production standards

Seven years advising the largest sites on Black Friday, where a minute of downtime is real revenue. I think about where a system fails before it ships and what telemetry you'll wish you had. Models get the same treatment as any dependency: budgets, fallbacks, and signals.

Agents doing my job Transform the nature of work

I run coding agents across the SDLC and was ranked among Snowflake's top ten AI users. Actively mapping which parts of development to automate — and when a harness, a skill, an agent, or a plugin is the right tool for the job.

Experience

Jun 2025 — PresentRemote, CA

Principal Application Architect

Snowflake

Design application and AI architectures for Snowflake's largest customers — major US banks, the US military, retail finance, and healthcare — taking them from idea to production with speed and confidence.
Build AI agents (MCP), semantic models, MDM platforms, and internal data applications; multi-cloud across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Snowpark Container Services.
Own end-to-end data engineering workflows: ingestion, transformation, security, and RBAC.
Ranked among the top ten AI users company-wide; use coding agents throughout the workflow with explicit human-verification checkpoints.

MCP · Snowpark · SPCS · Python · SQL · AWS · Azure · GCP

Jan 2018 — Jun 2025SF Bay Area

Solutions Architect, Strategic Accounts

New Relic

Sales Engineer, EnterpriseSales Engineer, Key AccountsAssoc. Solutions ArchitectSolutions Architect, Strategic

Technical advisor to New Relic's largest customers ($MM+/yr): architected observability — instrumentation, SLOs, alerting, incident response — across microservices, cloud, mobile, and browser.
Sat in customer war rooms on their highest-stakes days — Black Friday and peak events — where a minute of downtime is measurable revenue. Learned firsthand where production systems break and what signals you need before you need them.
Led multi-million-dollar contract expansions as the technical partner to account executives.
Four promotions in five years.

APM · distributed tracing · SLOs · Kubernetes · AWS/GCP/Azure · mobile & browser instrumentation

Jun 2016 — Feb 2018San Francisco

Product Engineer

Praetorian

Customer-facing product engineer at a cybersecurity firm; owned product roadmap and technical architecture for several internal and external products.
Wore product, engineering, and customer-success hats — from executive stakeholders down to shipping the code.

React · Python · Java · Go · Kubernetes · Google Cloud

May 2014 — Jun 2016San Francisco

Founder

BoostLegal

Founded and built a platform helping newspapers, radio, and TV stations sell native advertising with local experts; took it from idea to launch and a handful of paying customers, integrating with publishers' existing IT.
It didn't find scale, and I shut it down in 2016. Two years of owning product, engineering, sales, and support end to end.

Mar 2012 — Feb 2014San Mateo, CA

Management & Technology Consultant

CSC

Standardized post-acquisition process and technology flows for a top US financial institution; managed the implementation team on a large telecom ERP program.

Feb 2011 — Apr 2012San Francisco

Full-Stack Engineer

Mambo Studios

Raised seed funding and built a mobile gaming studio; shipped several games featured in both the iOS App Store and Google Play.

Objective-C · Cocos2D · Java (Android) · Python · Google Cloud

2007 — 2010

UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering — software research: C++/Qt multithreaded framework integrating new gamma-ray imaging devices.
UCI Beckman Laser Institute — software research: optimized MATLAB analysis for an in-vivo near-infrared spectroscopy lab.

Skills

LanguagesTypeScript / JavaScript, Python, Go, Java, C++, SQL, Objective-C. Learned on C++ and Java; new languages are a weekend.
Front-endReact, HTML/CSS, native iOS and Android, browser instrumentation.
Back-endMicroservices, Kubernetes, AWS / Azure / GCP, Snowflake & Snowpark Container Services, data pipelines, RBAC.
AIAgent architectures, MCP, semantic models, coding agents in the loop (harnesses, skills, plugins), human-verification design.
ReliabilityObservability, SLOs, alerting, incident response, launch readiness for peak-traffic events.

Education

University of California, BerkeleyBS, Engineering Science · 2010

Certifications

SnowPro CoreSnowflake · 2026
Machine Learning — Andrew NgStanford / Coursera · 2021
Solutions Architect, AssociateAmazon Web Services · 2018
Software Product ManagementProduct School · 2017