Open to opportunities

Jack Widman

@jackwidman

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Senior Scala engineer and functional programming expert turning mathematical rigor into production-grade systems.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek senior engineering roles focused on pure functional Scala, AI/LLM systems, or technical leadership at mission-driven teams that value long-term maintainability, mentoring, and principled design.

I am a Senior Scala Engineer and Ph.D. mathematician who designs robust, scalable systems using pure functional programming. I translate mathematical rigor into expressive software architectures, authoring books and leading greenfield projects from idea to production.

I have 15+ years of experience across backend, mobile, and infrastructure, with deep expertise in Scala (Cats, Cats Effect, FS2, ZIO), AI/LLM orchestration, and data pipelines. I have led engineering teams, mentored developers, and delivered type-safe, testable systems in production environments.

As a founder, principal engineer, and former CTO, I focus on code clarity, long-term maintainability, and principled design while managing full-stack development, cloud deployments, and DevOps to ship reliable products.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Founder & Principal Engineer

Current

Discursa

Jun 2025 - Present (4 months)

Designed and implemented a pure-Scala (Scala 3.3.3, Http4s, Cats Effect 3, FS2) end-to-end system, built backend services, PostgreSQL schema, and React Native mobile apps, and managed AWS Fargate/ECS deployment pipelines to production.

Scala Cats Effect 3 Http4s Fs2 React Native PostgreSQL AWS Fargate DevOps

Visiting Professor

Wesleyan University

Feb 2025 - Jun 2025 (4 months)

Taught 'How to Design a Program' and mentored students in software engineering while researching formal foundations of functional programming and mathematical computer science.

Teaching Curriculum Development Functional Programming Mentoring Research Software Engineering

Senior Scala Engineer

OneBridge

Jun 2024 - Dec 2024 (6 months)

Developed functional Scala pipelines for cancer image analysis, maintained a large type-safe Scala codebase for scientific workflows, and mentored engineers in Cats Effect and idiomatic functional Scala.

Scala Functional Programming Data Pipelines Testing Mentoring

Senior Scala Engineer

Tavant

Feb 2024 - May 2024 (3 months)

Upgraded Scala infrastructure to 2.13 and Cats Effect 3, and built Spark-based metadata processing tools to improve performance and reliability through pure FP refactoring.

Scala Cats Effect 3 Spark Refactoring Performance Optimization CI CD

Senior Scala & Go Engineer

Bayer Crop Science

Jan 2022 - Apr 2023 (1 year 3 months)

Built scalable gRPC microservices (Scala/Akka) integrated with GCP and BigQuery, created FP data ingestion pipelines, and developed React components for bioinformatics tools.

Scala Akka Go gRPC GCP BigQuery Kafka Protobuf React

CTO & Co-founder

MoodBerry

Jan 2021 - Jan 2022 (1 year)

Led development of a mood-based creativity app using Scala/Play and React Native, managed product roadmap, UX, backend, and cloud infrastructure, and launched the MVP with go-to-market guidance.

Scala Play Framework React Native Product Management Cloud Infrastructure MVP Launch UX

Senior Scala Engineer

Verizon

Aug 2020 - Dec 2020 (4 months)

Developed an OAuth2 device code authentication flow in Scala, integrated secure AWS infrastructure and CI/CD automation, and advocated for functional programming and type-safe practices.

Scala OAUTH2 AWS CI CD Security Functional Programming Mentoring

Senior Scala Engineer

Sep 2017 - Nov 2019 (2 years 2 months)

Built scalable backend microservices using Scala, Spark, Akka Streams, and Kafka, led infrastructure migration to Docker/Kubernetes, and applied DDD and FP principles to architecture decisions.