Jackson Gabbard Curriculum Vitae
London, UK, Tier 1 Exceptional Talent Visa Holder | Email jg [at] jg.gg
Professional Experience
2018-2020 Cord (nee Radical)
Currently building a new generation of tooling to make existing SaaS tools more collaborative and human than they’ve ever been. I’m working as the CTO and Cofounder. We’re growing week on week and launching new features constantly. It’s an exciting time.
2018-2020 Synthace Ltd
Product engineering lead, engineering manager. Joined at a difficult moment in the company’s evolution. Tech team was dwindling. CTO was being managed out of the company. Across 18 months, I helped reset the engineering team. Built the product team from 0 to 8 engineers. Helped the engineering team grow from ~10 engineers to 45. Successfully attracted engineers from DeepMind, SwiftKey, Bloomberg, Google, and Facebook. Helped pivot the entire product codebase from PolymerJS to ReactJS/TypeScript. Committed ~600 changes to the product codebase.
2016-2018 Funemployment
My long tenure at Facebook gave me the luxury of being able to take some time off. I did some advising. Helped a company bootstrap. Created a YouTube channel about engineering which has grown to tens of thousands of subscribers. That growth is mostly due to recruitment teams at companies like AirBnB, Google, and Facebook sending their candidates links to the videos so they have a better chance at performing well in the interview process. Fun times.
2009-2016 Facebook Inc.
2009-2011 – Infrastructure – Planned, designed and built user interfaces to run Facebook’s largest-scale systems, including the web server fleet of more than 100K machines
2011-2013 – Mobile – Lead UI engineer on the Timeline implementation for mobile web; built a (now patented) mobile data logging infrastructure for web, iOS, and Android
2012-2016 – London Engineering Team Founder – One of twelve engineers selected from 100+ engineers to relocate to the UK and begin our first international engineering team
2013-2014 – Internal Tools – Expanded internal productivity tools used by the entire company, including our real-time product configuration tools and internal task management tool, began and led the project for automatic metrics collection of usage data of internal tooling
2014-2016 – Site Integrity / Safety – Built real-time abuse detection systems to protect people on Facebook from sextortionists and other bad actors; led the team for and delivered a rebuild of our photo matching infrastructure used to prevent the sharing of child exploitation images and many other forms of abusive content
NB: Some projects have been omitted due to unlaunched and/or non-public nature.
Accolades
Began as an entry-level engineer in the California Headquarters, promoted 3 times to Engineer Level 6 (top 25% of all engineering). In 2011, received company-wide recognition for excellence in engineering for refactoring and modernizing our mobile web stack. Many-time contributor to the Dead Code Society recognizing deletion of unused code in blocks of 1000 lines or more. Participated in the growth of the engineering organization from about 300 engineers to over 5000. Helped the company transition from startup phase through IPO and international expansion.
Founding member of the London engineering team, scaling the office from 12 engineers to over 450. Mentored 100+ new engineers and led onboarding sessions in both technical and cultural domains. 507 career interviews and dozens of new interviewer mentorship sessions. Proud leader of the London office-wide Games Day every year.
2007-2009 EchoMusic / TicketMaster
User interface team leader, modernized the operations of the 10 person design organization from dated Actionscript 2.0 and spaghetti JavaScript to ActionScript 3.0 and modern JavaScript with a shared UI component library and industry best practices; implemented ~50 high-end artist websites including Kanye West’s first blog, Taylor Swift’s first website, and many more. Now shutdown, archive here https://goo.gl/NjomsP.
Education
2002-2006 Austin Peay State University
Clarksville, Tennessee, USA – Bachelor of Arts in English, Minor in Education. Graduated Magna Cum Laude. Twice awarded for Excellence in Technical Communication by the Languages and Literature department.
Speaking Engagements
InterTech Make Stuff Better Hackathon 2015, Event Organizer, http://goo.gl/eXgLZN
Oxford University, Facebook Drop-In Session, 2014, https://goo.gl/g6WkJv
Oxford University, Codelaborate Meetup, 2014, https://goo.gl/uWyCHW
Mobile Central Europe, 2014, Move Fast, Support Multiple Platforms, https://goo.gl/MOUOw6
BubbleConf 2013; Facebook Tools and Infrastructure, by hand; http://goo.gl/GkKCwE
{ develop: BBC } 2013, Faster than Agile: Coding at Scale, https://goo.gl/V9gSC4
Imperial College London 2013, Nothing Is Someone Else’s Problem, http://goo.gl/5E4mm2
Facebook Mobile Developer Conference 2013, How We Made m.facebook.com Fast, https://goo.gl/oD4aHj, Awarded Most Valuable Talk of the conference by attendees
Edge Conf 2013, Network Panel and Event Co-Organizer, https://goo.gl/XMkniu
Kings of Code Conference 2012, Bringing HTML5 into Nativelandia, https://goo.gl/9WRKDI
Velocity Conference 2012, Bringing HTML5 into Nativelandia, http://goo.gl/xl4Cgu
BarCamp Nashville 2010, JavaScript at Facebook, https://goo.gl/qP5F4K