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.

🛠️ Skilled in JavaScript/TypeScript and TailwindCSS across frameworks. Happy to work in other languages like python or golang. Comfortable with different cloud providers. Will go deep to understand architecture choices. Active AI user and builder.

Haydn Labs: Founder, Boston, 2013 - present

multi-user AI chat (TS, Tailwind, RedwoodSDK, AIsdk, OpenAI, Cloudflare)
presskit: AI chat + Web publishing
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 (local first sync architecture)

Zero ASIC: Software Architect, Dublin & Boston, 2023

Semiconductor company developing a disruptive chiplet-based platform
Shipped self-service design and emulation web application
Deployed on AWS EC2 and ECS, with front-end on Cloudflare workers
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
Deployed on GCP with Kubernetes

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 built on RoR and mySQL

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