Jürgen Leschner

Full-stack Web software engineer and experienced EM/PM leader.

❤️ Love to shape new products, work closely with customers, read and write and delete code, collaborate on issues and PRs, improve usability, build automation, measure performance, refine docs, handle on-call.

🚢 Shipped software at GitHub, VMware, Microsoft, and a variety of startups. Always learning.

🏡 Home in Lexington MA, 2nd base in Dublin Ireland. OG from Johannesburg.

Haydn Labs: Founder, Boston, 2013 - present

Spaces: Organizational memory for agents and humans
presskit: AI + Web content, built on Cloudflare Workers
gitkitjs: SvelteKit static site generator, inspired by VitePress
pub-server: NPM-themable SSG and editor

Opral: Engineering, Dublin & Boston, Jan - June 2024

Part of the awesome team building inlang, a multi-sided i18n platform, and lix change control

Zero ASIC: Software Architect, Dublin & Boston, 2023

Semiconductor company developing a disruptive chiplet-based platform
Shipped self-service design and emulation web application
Built zaui, a pip-installable, python-extensible SSG

Gitpod: Product manager, Cambridge UK, 2021 - 2022

PM on feature team for k8s-based Cloud development environments.
Successfully led the team to ship usage-based billing

VMware: Product leader, Cambridge USA & Cambridge UK, 2017 - 2021

Incubated Tanzu Application Accelerator - demo
Co-led riff, a serverless application service for Kubernetes
Enjoyed working with the amazing engineers and being "the other Jürgen" on the Spring team

GitHub: Principal Engineer, EM, Cambridge USA, 2016 - 2017

Designed, built, shipped, and operated new features for GitHub Pages
On-call devops for high-volume SaaS platform

EMC / VMWare: Engineering manager, Boston, 2008 - 2013

Led development of Cloud Foundry S3 emulator - early adopter of node.js
Built EMC Atmos Compute service working with an excellent team in China

Pi Corp:. Co-founder, Boston, Dubai, Bangalore, Montreal, 2003 - 2008

Software architect serving a remarkable distributed team of engineers
Built consumer desktop search and sharing applications: Pi, and Pi Photo
Led a deep foray into NoSQL and XML databases

Collego: Founder, Boston 1999 - 2001

Proud founder of dot-com venture-backed startup, acquired by MRO/IBM
Built the team and delivered a web catalog content management product
Engineered a pre-RDF binary-relational database

Siebel Interactive: 1st hire, Engineering manager, Boston MA 1997 - 1999

Engineering lead on one of the first personalized publishing platforms
Great team, company acquired by Siebel

École Européenne des Affaires: Paris, France

MBA (and networking lol)

Microsoft: Engineer, Program Manager, Redmond WA

Engineer for MS Word localization in the International Product Group
Program manager on Word for Windows v1

Digital Techniques: Engineer, Burlington MA

Built touchscreen video product with an excellent team of hardware and software engineers

MIT: Cambridge, MA

Computer Science and Engineering (course VI-III)
Undergraduate research with amazing professors including David P. Reed
MIT Media Lab: turtle-graphics videodisc authoring thesis project supervised by Prof. Seymour Papert

Damelin College: Academic high school, Johannesburg S.Africa

Fortunate to have had such great teachers esp. in Computer Science