Open to opportunities

Jason Ellington

@jasonellington

I build reliable Go backend and Kubernetes platforms for high-traffic SaaS and fintech products.

At Squarespace, I own Go backend architecture for commerce and creator workflows, building REST and gRPC services that improved p95 latency by 28% and reduced deployment toil by 30%.

Previously at Nivelo, I built payment-risk services and Kubernetes infrastructure for bank-payment workflows, improving throughput by 35% and cutting manual release steps by 40%.

I've also delivered backend systems for Better's digital mortgage platform, CB Insights' market-intelligence products, and Guardian Life's insurance workflows. My work spans distributed messaging, PostgreSQL and Redis, observability, performance profiling, CI/CD, and containerized deployment.

I lead architecture and code reviews, create reusable platform patterns, and mentor engineers on Go concurrency, operational debugging, secure service design, documentation, and on-call practices.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Software Engineer

Current

Squarespace

Jan 2025 - Present (1 year 7 months)

Own architecture for Go backend services supporting commerce and creator workflows, designing REST and gRPC APIs with distributed systems. Built Kubernetes-native platform components, reducing deployment toil by 30% and improving p95 latency by 28%.

gRPC REST APIs Kubernetes Docker Helm Controller Runtime PostgreSQL Redis Kafka OpenTelemetry Prometheus Datadog CI CD GitHub Actions Pprof Benchmarking

Senior Software Engineer

Nivelo

May 2022 - Dec 2024 (2 years 7 months)

Designed Go payment-risk backend services for a bank-payment platform, implementing gRPC and REST APIs with PostgreSQL and Redis. Built Kubernetes controllers and internal CLI tooling, cutting manual release steps by 40% and improving throughput by 35%.

gRPC REST APIs Protocol Buffers PostgreSQL Redis Kubernetes Controller Runtime Helm Docker Kafka NATS OpenTelemetry Pprof Benchmarking

Software Engineer

Better

May 2021 - Apr 2022 (11 months)

Built backend services for a digital mortgage platform, exposing REST APIs and Go service modules for loan workflows. Implemented distributed underwriting and document-processing workflows with Kafka messaging and improved API reliability through testing and optimization.

REST APIs PostgreSQL Redis Docker Kubernetes Kafka CI CD SQL Integration Testing Unit Testing

Software Engineer

CB Insights

Dec 2019 - Apr 2021 (1 year 4 months)

Developed backend APIs for a market-intelligence platform, delivering company, funding, and investor data through REST services. Built data-ingestion and enrichment pipelines with Kafka and improved platform responsiveness through debugging and profiling.

Python REST APIs PostgreSQL Redis Docker Kubernetes Kafka CI CD GitHub Actions SQL

Software Engineer

Guardian Life

Sep 2017 - Nov 2019 (2 years 2 months)

Built enterprise backend services for insurance workflows, implementing REST APIs, Java and Go components, and relational database access. Supported containerized deployments and CI/CD pipelines, and improved debugging of production support issues.

Java REST APIs SQL Docker Jenkins Kubernetes CI CD Debugging