Jack Senechal

Engineering Manager

Located in Novato, CA
Phone: 415-779-2701
Email: jacksenechal@gmail.com
GitHub: github.com/jacksenechal
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jacksenechal

Summary

• Engineering manager with 15+ years in software development and 6+ years building and leading teams delivering SaaS to external customers across multiple product domains
• Recruited, coached, and grew high-performing, globally distributed teams from scratch — set development standards and methodology, ran hiring and performance management, and elevated junior engineers to senior and engineering-management roles
• Hands-on technical leader who provides architectural design oversight (scalable, maintainable systems) while staying deep in code review and implementation alongside management responsibilities
• Drove organization-wide DevOps culture transformation, influencing decisions at all levels and promoting engineering best practices
• Strong cross-functional collaborator who translates technical concepts for non-technical audiences and aligns roadmaps with business objectives
• Building AI and automation into products today (LLM tooling, evaluation frameworks); entrepreneurial mindset with multiple co-founding experiences

Industry Experience

Co-founder & Fractional CTO

Building Humane Technology | June 2025 - Mar 2026 | Remote

• Co-architecting and leading development of HumaneBench.ai, an open-source AI evaluation framework built on AISI Inspect. Python.
• Driving product and technical roadmap including production monitoring, multi-turn evaluation, and maturity models to guide AI tool adoption across teams.
• Coordinating open-source community engagement, hackathons, and education initiatives.

Co-founder & Software Engineer

Mirror Astrology | Nov 2024 - Present | Remote

• Built AI chatbot integrating multiple LLMs with complex prompting, tool use, and context augmentation.
• Front-end development: Ruby on Rails views, JavaScript, HTML+CSS, Tailwind, responsive UI/UX.
• Back-end development: Stripe integration, SSO authentication, Rails MVC.
• Collaborated closely with co-founders on product direction, Figma design, UX, roadmap planning, and prioritization.

Infrastructure Engineer

Tobiko | Mar 2024 - Oct 2024 | Remote

• Architected and implemented a scalable cloud platform serving customer workloads at a fast-paced startup.
• Built CI/CD patterns including mono-repo conditional workflows, workload identity federation, and continuous delivery.
• Implemented a Slack-based customer support and incident response platform; onboarded teammates and customers.
• Python, Pulumi, GCP, GKE, Cloud Run, CircleCI, Helm, SQLMesh.

Engineering Manager / Principal Software Engineer

Mavenlink / Kantata | Apr 2017 - Dec 2023 | San Francisco, CA

• M-Bridge Integration Platform (2 years): Managed the team owning an external-facing component of Kantata’s SaaS — an agent-based integration platform orchestrating multi-system customer data (Salesforce, HRIS, accounting). Provided architectural oversight that turned a flaky, escalation-heavy system into a scalable, maintainable one, reducing errors and incidents by ~100x. Executed a zero-downtime migration to Kubernetes including relational, document, and cache databases.
• Infrastructure Platform (4 years): Recruited and built a new, globally distributed team from scratch. Set development standards and methodology, ran hiring, onboarding, and performance management, and led the organization’s DevOps culture transformation as change agent and technical authority across engineering. Created a clear, calm, constructive environment where the team thrived. Owned roadmap stewardship and priority management while staying hands-on with architecture and code review. Transitioned a large legacy codebase to cloud-native, Infrastructure-as-Code tooling (Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes).
• BI Data Pipeline (3 months): Led a transition team to take ownership of and improve the analytics data pipeline. Migrated the pipeline to Kubernetes.
• Cross-Functional Impact: Mentored engineers across teams — notably coached a junior engineer who grew to Engineering Manager. Led interviewing and hiring. Drove organizational change management and process optimization. Top Performer Award, 2021.

Lead Developer, Co-founder

Pegg | 2014 - 2017 | San Francisco, CA

• Designed, architected, and built a cross-platform mobile app from scratch (iOS/Android). Node.js backend, JS/Phonegap frontend, Firebase real-time systems, CI/CD to AWS/CloudFront via CircleCI.
• Established engineering workflow: pair programming, automated testing (Karma/Chai), continuous integration, and rapid deployment processes.
• Co-led product strategy, monetization, and launch planning.

Earlier Career (2001 - 2014)

• Consultant & Entrepreneur (2008 - 2014): Founded OpenTest Pro (automated testing education). Built e-commerce ordering system for Turnbull & Asser shirtmakers. Full-stack consulting in Ruby on Rails, Node.js, D3 data visualization. Rapid prototyping and client delivery.
• Web Developer, OnForce, Inc (2006 - 2007): Introduced automated testing and CI. Built comprehensive API test suite. Integrated platform with Salesforce APIs.
• Development Lead, JBA Network (2003 - 2006): Lead programmer and project manager for mynewsletterbuilder.com — architected initial release, then built and scaled the development team.

Open Source Projects

Scan MCP (2024 - Present)

MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for scanner automation and document digitization. Privacy-first architecture with smart device discovery, JSON Schema validation, and support for both local stdio and network HTTP transports. TypeScript/Node.js.

github.com/jacksenechal/scan-mcp

HumaneBench (2024 - Present)

Evaluation framework for measuring human-friendly behavior in AI assistants, built on AISI Inspect. Tests AI responses across humane technology principles including loneliness, mental health, transparency, and privacy. Supports multiple LLM providers with extensible scenario datasets. Python.

github.com/buildinghumanetech/humanebench

Skills

• Languages & Frameworks: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Bash.
• Front-end: React, Vue, HTML, CSS, Tailwind, Responsive Design, UI/UX.
• Back-end & Data: API Design, Microservices, Distributed Systems, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, Helm.
• CI/CD & DevOps: CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Automated Testing, TDD, Infrastructure as Code, Cloud-Native Architecture.
• AI/LLM: MCP (Model Context Protocol), chatbot development, prompt engineering, tool use, context augmentation.
• Leadership: Team Building, Coaching & Mentoring, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Roadmap Ownership, Hiring, Agile/Scrum/Kanban, Change Management.

Education

BA in Mathematics, minor in Computer Science

University of North Carolina at Asheville | May 2003

• Graduated with distinction in Mathematics. Undergraduate research in 4D fractals.

Recommendations

“Jack is an exceptional engineer and leader. He strives to deeply understand the technology he’s working on while remaining cognizant of the socio-technical components that may be a factor in any project. He’s thorough, detail-oriented, and outcome-oriented, which means the solutions he architects, builds, and collaborates on come out better. Jack also strives to be at the forefront of new technology and assess how he can leverage it. He does all this with a strong team mentality, is a phenomenal team player, and can effectively delegate to help lift others’ skill sets.”

— Brandon Clifford, Director of DevOps, Kantata

“Jack has had quite a profound impact on my career. As a young engineer, I was fortunate enough to work with Jack as my coach. He served as a great mentor, helping me build both technical and professional skills and forming me into the engineer that I am today. His mentorship was a key factor in elevating me from an incoming Junior Engineer to an Engineering Manager. Jack has a great curiosity and a strong set of technical capabilities that allow him to serve as a great example for others and a key contributor to any team!”

— Wesley Morlock, Engineering Manager, Kantata

“Jack is a fantastic engineer always ready to help solve problems and more importantly, teach you how to solve them. He guided me and my team through a bunch of challenging GitOps situations with patience and kindness, leading by example. Always diligent with his work, willing to roll up his sleeves to get things done and find creative solutions. Everyone would be lucky to have someone like him in their teams!”

— Cesar Palafox Garza, Principal Software Engineer, Kantata

“Jack is awesome at understanding the direction teams need to go to make important improvements in Kantata’s Engineering organization as a whole. He has been instrumental in building and implementing strategies to upgrade Ruby, Rails, and React. If I had any questions about infrastructure and Kubernetes he would be able to answer and provide solid explanations to the entire team.”

— Justin Hurstwright, Principal Software Engineer, Kantata

See additional recommendations on LinkedIn