Jake Goldsborough

Software Engineer | DevOps & Automation

Versatile Software Engineer with over a decade of experience in software development, DevOps, and automation. Proven ability to design, develop, and optimize scalable systems, reducing operational overhead and improving performance. Passionate about problem-solving, automation, and infrastructure as code. Experienced in working remotely and collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver efficient, maintainable solutions.

Experience

Discourse

Software Engineer (Infrastructure), 2025-current

Eliminated 16x storage inflation on backups via upload deduplication

Shipped a hardlink-based deduplication pass in Discourse's backup creator that groups uploads by content hash and stores duplicate content once. Reduced one customer site from 432 GB to 26 GB of unique content. Followed up with an ext4-hardlink-limit fallback after finding a single reaction GIF duplicated 246,173 times, turning what would have been 246k redundant S3 downloads into 5.

Designed pre-provisioning pool for instant trial signups

Architected and shipped a pool of pre-built Discourse sites claimed at signup time, using FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED for safe concurrent claiming with graceful fallback to live provisioning. Target signup time of 90s reduced to under 15s. Includes a subdomain-name generator producing 2,805 readable combinations from curated word lists.

Optimized Ruby/SQL hot paths in core and internal services

Rewrote Discourse's daily category-stats job from per-row Ruby iteration (8 queries per category) to batched SQL aggregation with COUNT(*) FILTER (WHERE ...), achieving an 8.6x speedup at production scale (2,000 categories / 1.6M posts). Separately refactored an internal hosted-sites API endpoint from 27-second timeouts to under 10 seconds by eliminating N+1 Redis lookups and adding a request-scoped tier cache.

Parallelized CI and restructured build pipelines

Cut a Ruby/Rails service's CI runtime from 10 minutes to 3-4 by parallelizing RSpec across 4 GitHub Actions runners, surfacing and fixing several pre-existing test-isolation bugs in the process. Restructured the build Dockerfile into multi-stage layers so lockfile changes no longer bust source-code caches, cutting code-only deploys from ~10 minutes to ~6.

Contributed S3 IAM role assumption to Discourse core

Multi-quarter upstream contribution letting Discourse installations use IAM role assumption for S3 instead of long-lived access keys. Worked around a Ruby AWS SDK credential-chain precedence bug, refactored a singleton that was leaking credentials across sites in multisite mode, and collaborated with maintainers through review iteration on a safer simplified release.

Flashpoint

Software Engineer II (Mid-Level), 2022 - 2024

Reduced infrastructure setup time from days to hours

Led Terraform and Kubernetes pipeline implementation. Designed reusable Terraform modules and automated Kubernetes resource creation using Node.js. Initiated Helm chart development for better deployment management.

Eliminated hours of manual work across teams

Enhanced an AngularJS web application to efficiently manage and connect to cloud-based VMs.

Refactored a legacy Java-based API into a modern Node.js service

Reduced technical debt and simplified maintenance for future feature requests.

Developed CI/CD pipelines and Dockerized applications

Supported an AngularJS-to-React migration, ensuring seamless frontend transitions and improving local development environments.

Debugged and resolved mission-critical issues in cloud-based Linux VMs

Optimized RDP performance and fixed PulseAudio configurations, enhancing system stability.

Mentored junior engineers

Contributed to technical interviews, fostering a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.

Infinity Interactive

Software Engineer, 2010 - 2020

Contracted full-stack work for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies including Shutterstock, Allegra, and Flashpoint. Built and maintained production applications across Node.js, GraphQL, React, and Vue.js stacks. Notable: improved a high-traffic application's response times by 75% via a Redis caching strategy.

Skills & Technologies

Programming

Ruby, Node.js, TypeScript, Python, Rust

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Google Cloud

Frontend

React, Vue.js, AngularJS

DevOps & CI/CD

Docker, Git, NixOS

Databases & Caching

Postgres, MySQL, Redis, GraphQL

Operating Systems

Linux/Unix (Debian, Ubuntu, NixOS, macOS), BSD

Languages

English (Native), Swedish (Learning)

Additional Information

Open to relocation to Europe and remote-friendly opportunities.

Strong advocate for automation, scalable infrastructure, and developer tooling improvements.

Available for interviews and technical discussions upon request.