Jack Senechal

Engineering Leader / Entrepreneur

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

Summary

• Proven leader in software development, infrastructure, and team management with 15+ years of hands-on experience
• Committed mentor and coach, elevating team members’ skill sets and fostering professional growth
• Strategic thinker, mercurial innovator, and expert problem solver
• Resilient and dedicated, ready to embrace challenges and opportunities
• Strong customer focus, advocating for impactful changes and ensuring product value
• Entrepreneurial spirit with multiple co-founding experiences
• Full-stack generalist specializing in DevOps, AI/LLM integration, and modern web
• Seeking a hands-on engineering leadership role at a high-growth company

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): Led a team to stabilize and scale an agent-based integration platform handling multi-system data orchestration. Established operational metrics and monitoring that reduced 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 team from scratch dedicated to the infrastructure platform. Led the organization’s DevOps culture transformation. Owned roadmap stewardship, requirements triage, and priority management while staying hands-on with coding, 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.

Consultant and Entrepreneur

Freelance | 2008 - 2014

• 2014 - Rapid prototyping of global-graph technologies using XDI. Integration of XDI services with existing Ruby on Rails application. Launched beta cloud name service based on XDI and Node.js.
• Superluminal Systems - 2013 - Helped to develop the Superluminal Learning Management System and launch the first client site. Building data visualizations and UI elements in D3. WordPress plugin wrangling, development, and customization.
• OpenTest Pro, LLC - 2008 - 2012 - Founded the company to provide educational resources relating to automated testing and continuous integration using open-source tools in a PHP environment. Technical writing, web application development in Ruby on Rails and Flex, studio voiceover recording, and project management.
• Turnbull & Asser shirtmakers - 2009 - Built a virtual showroom for their bespoke department, allowing users to browse fabrics and place orders. Ruby on Rails backend, Flash frontend.

Web Developer

OnForce, Inc | 2006 - 2007

• Introduced automated testing and continuous integration. Implemented a comprehensive test suite for the public-facing API.
• Project managed the implementation of Salesforce throughout the company and oversaw the administration of the application.
• Integrated OnForce platform with Salesforce APIs to provide up-to-date customer information for sales and support teams.

Development Lead

JBA Network | 2003 - 2006

• Project manager and lead programmer for mynewsletterbuilder.com. Architected and implemented the initial release, then built and scaled the development team.
• Developed a modular, evented, MVC programming framework.
• Concept development, project management, and programming for other company products and services, including jukeboxalive.com and byregion.net.
• Systems administration and networking (Linux, Windows).

Intern

US Navy FNMOD | 2001

• Programmer and database designer for the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Detachment.
• Migrated Navy weather data from a flat text format to a MySQL database.
• Wrote a Java application to quality check, normalize, and convert weather data to a MySQL-accessible format.

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

Technical Skills

• Languages & Frameworks: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Bash.
• AI/LLM Development: MCP (Model Context Protocol), chatbot development, prompt engineering, tool use, context augmentation.
• Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cloud-based data services.
• Tools & Platforms: Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, Linux, Git, Webpack, Cloudfront, Helm.
• Front-end: React, Vue, HTML, CSS, Tailwind, Responsive Design, UI/UX.
• Back-end: API Design and Development, Microservices, Distributed Systems, System Architecture.
• Software Development: OOP, Functional Programming, Automated Testing, CI/CD, TDD, Infrastructure as Code, Cloud-Native Architecture.

Methodologies

• Project Management: Agile, Pair Programming, DevOps, Lean Thinking, Rapid Prototyping, Scrum, Kanban.
• Design & Architecture: Software Design Patterns, Systems Design, Infrastructure as Code (IAC), Data Pipeline Design, Cloud-Native Architecture, User Interface Design.

Leadership

• Team Building, Cross-Functional Leadership, Coaching & Mentoring, Talent Recruitment & Development, High-Performance Team Management, Strategic Planning, Decision Making, Change Management.
• Effective Communication, Stakeholder Engagement, Problem-Solving, Customer-Oriented Approach.
• Entrepreneurship, Product Development, Adaptive Learning.

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. Newer tech like GenAI can be complex and ever-evolving, and Jack is not one to back down but step up and embrace. 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. Throughout our time together, Jack was caring and invested in helping me set goals and develop my career. 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, maybe tinkering in some kind of script that would make the manual processes easier and more resilient. 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

“Jack provided invaluable leadership as a Principal Software Engineer at Kantata. He was a powerful voice for the technology but made sure to advocate for changes that were also certain to provide immediate impact to the customer. I highly recommend Jack as an excellent dev ops engineer and as a technical leader.”

— Nathan Perry, Principal Software Engineer, Kantata

“Jack is talented both as a software developer and as an operations engineer. While working together in a Principal Engineer capacity, I saw how passionate Jack is about helping his colleagues and his organization level up. He is a great engineer with excellent leadership and organizational abilities.”

— Jason Larsen, Software Engineering Manager, Kantata

“Jack is a phenomenal resource to work with. He is very knowledgeable about programming and cloud infrastructure and is always eager to learn new things.”

— Donovan Hubbard, Senior DevOps Engineer, Kantata

“Jack has a flair for finding better, faster, and more reliable ways to get things done. He advocates best practices, like unit testing, and has a deep knowledge of OO architecture. Jack thinks on his toes, and will always be there with the team at 4 a.m. if circumstance requires it. :%s/average developers/developers like jack/g if you know what’s good for you.”

— Greg Whitescarver, Founder, Mojave

“With Jack, the more complex the problem, the more simple his solutions. From eradicating dynamic php bugs to providing innovative javascript capabilities, Master Senechal is more than a mind to be reckoned with, he’s an integrative capacity builder with a wide range of technological expertise. If there is anything that can be done through web development, Jack can figure out how to do it, and make it happen.”

— Adam Apollo, Cofounder & CEO, Superluminal Systems

See additional recommendations on LinkedIn