Jeff Terry

At Spade, the systems I've built and the projects I've led have enabled us to maintain an historical uptime above 99.999% and to achieve latencies more than 10x lower than those of competitors (in an uptime- and latency-critical space!).

Recently, I've been focusing my efforts on improving Spade's data pipelines. For instance, I've led projects to increase our underlying data quality, to improve the stability of our pipelines, and to create tooling to empower the data science team to move more quickly and collaborate more easily. As an example, one project I led ended up achieving a 50% increase in the accuracy of our lat/lon data (which was more than even I thought we could achieve, and I tend to be a pretty optimistic person)!

Previously, I was a full-stack engineer at Concertiv, where I led the development of their B2B product procurement platform, integrating workflow tools, contract management, and spend analysis to help companies optimize B2B spend. Before that, I worked as a software engineering intern for Microsoft, National Instruments, and a few other companies, in addition to co-founding a company back in college.

Outside of tech, I’ve worked as a writing tutor and a rhetoric instructor at the university level. As part of my graduate studies at The Ohio State University, I focused on two research areas: 1) The impacts of technology on society and the human experience during the Modernist era (~1880–1918; an era that closely mirrors our own, in fact!) and 2) Digital media studies and software usability. My work in the latter area culminated in Presly, an online presentation coach that teaches students how to give great presentations.

My passion for software (and building things more generally) began in the field of robotics, when two friends and I won an international high school robotics competition as eighth graders, a competition we went on to win two more times once we became proper high schoolers. Here's a video of two of my favorite robots. My experience working in robotics encouraged a first-principles-based, goal-oriented, and honest approach to engineering, which still drives my work today.