Jacob Stephens

Work

Senior Platform & Infrastructure Engineer

Educational Travel Adventures | Feb 2022 - Present | United States, Remote

• I lead a two-engineer team owning the company's production stack - reservations platform, payment processing, Linux server fleet, and deployment pipeline - with end-to-end responsibility for architecture, operations, and on-call response across a multi-million-dollar travel business
• Developed guides.etadventures.com - a mobile-first PWA for field contractors with offline service-worker support, receipt-attached expense workflows, and manager admin; adopted by 77 guides over the past 12 months to file 410 tour reports, send 3,300+ traveler SMS, and process 1,800+ expense reports (~$154K), extending the JavaScript stack across a previously PHP-only platform
• Architected automated reservation-cancellation workflows in PHP and MySQL, preventing bad-debt accumulation with business-rule-driven automation
• Turned hard-coded email and voice payment reminders into a manager-editable system - self-service rules in the Tourbot UI, added Twilio SMS, wired to automated cancellation - cutting manual work by 80%+
• Drove production-database performance from measurement: caching and query work took alert pages from 5-10 seconds to under 1 second, and a performance_schema-led index pass (online DDL, zero downtime) eliminated ~80% of measured query time on the live primary; a profile-driven N+1 elimination pass on the group-manifest page cut SQL statements per request from ~2,650 to ~183 with byte-identical HTML output
• Led PCI compliance initiative: architected secure REST integrations with merchant payment processors, and inherited, improved, and modernized the ACH/NACHA bank-file workflows (SFTP) across PHP, MySQL, and OS major-version migrations, implementing security best practices including bank-account encryption
• Led three enterprise-wide platform migrations (PHP 5 -> 8, MySQL 5 -> 8, and CentOS 7 -> Rocky Linux 9) across the codebase and server fleet, modernizing the stack and improving application performance
• Established engineering practices across internal and customer-facing platforms - architecture decisions, code review, and mentoring two developers
• Built an internal orchestration and status platform (Python, Flask, SQLite) - a dashboard that probes the MySQL, web, and cron-server fleet every 60 seconds with operator deploy and preview-environment controls - running an autonomous coding agent as a scoped, least-privilege system user with auditable, vault-injected credentials
• Stood up fleet-wide observability on a Terraform-provisioned droplet - Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager instrumenting 14 hosts (node/mysqld/blackbox exporters: uptime, replication health, TLS expiry) with email and SMS paging consolidated into a single alert pipeline
• Designed and built three Manager Sandboxes - role-specific Tourbot instances in Docker containers behind Traefik for Sales, General Management, and Marketing - each with an isolated database, few-hour production refresh, per-container resource limits, and default-deny agent command execution; AI work is isolated on per-role branches behind a human merge gate through which 14 manager-prototyped features shipped to production. No agent approves, merges, deploys, or moves money without a named human gate - the seven-boundary safety checklist governing this is published as sanitized ADRs and a pattern write-up
• Replaced database triggers with binlog-tailing daemons for derived reporting data - reconciliation pipelines that keep denormalized tables consistent with the transactional source, in versioned code off the hot write path (ADR 0006)
• Built ProspectForge - an internal contact-sourcing platform (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy 2.0, Alembic, PostgreSQL, Next.js, self-hosted Firecrawl scraping, Docker Compose) to replace CivicIQ, the team's third-party prospecting SaaS, pending management approval
• Engineered a server-side deploy pipeline with dirty-worktree rejection, flock-based concurrency serialization, ancestor-only ref enforcement, post-deploy healthcheck, and one-command rollback - backed by a PHPUnit suite (unit / integration / functional) and GitHub Actions CI across PHP 8.1-8.4

Web Developer and Client Support Specialist

Sharp Innovations | Nov 2021 - Feb 2022 | Conestoga, PA

• Developed automated database migration scripts in SQL and PHP, reducing migration time from hours to minutes and eliminating manual errors
• Delivered technical support for web clients - UI/UX updates, security vulnerabilities, and Linux server configuration and optimization

Full-Stack Developer (Independent)

Steward Goods | Mar 2020 - Nov 2021 | United States, Remote

• Designed and shipped artifact.stewardgoods.com, a multi-tenant possessions tracker built on full-stack PHP and MySQL with frontend, backend, and deployment ownership
• Optimized website performance through code and infrastructure improvements, achieving perfect scores (100/100) on Google Core Web Vitals
• Engineered PCI-compliant subscription payments with Stripe in PHP and MySQL