Jessica Black

Founding engineer at Attune. I build AI agent systems in Rust and TypeScript. Before that, 13 years in distributed systems, program analysis, and developer tools, most recently as a tech lead at FOSSA.

Work

Attune Founding Engineer

2025 to present

  • Built an incident-triage agent that reads Sentry, Datadog, and Slack, runs the root-cause investigation in a sandbox, and cites its evidence.
  • Built an agent-first dev-sandbox platform for a client: full-stack cloud environments so engineers can run agents in parallel.
  • Hurry, a drop-in distributed build cache for Cargo: 3x median and up to 22x on clean builds across a broad range of Rust projects.
  • Nudge, guardrails for coding agents: tree-sitter and regex rules across 9 languages, wired into Claude Code and Codex hooks.
  • Bastion, agentic code review as focused single-concern reviewers, local and in CI.
  • Akari, a self-hosted history of every coding-agent session: each run readable end to end, every token priced.

FOSSA Software Engineer to Staff Tech Lead

2019 to 2025

  • Tech lead for the analysis platform, the distributed system under every FOSSA product: about 30k customer and 200k open-source projects a day across 20+ language ecosystems.
  • Introduced Rust to FOSSA and drove its adoption from one service to the default for new backend systems.
  • Founded and architected the analysis service. Took a hot path that was melting the database from seconds to sub-millisecond.
  • Tech lead for snippet scanning, design lead for reachability, both shipped publicly.
  • Primary author of Broker, the open-source on-prem connector that let security-conscious enterprises adopt FOSSA without exposing their source.

Reynolds & Reynolds Software Engineer

2013 to 2019

  • Built a remote backup-and-repair system for databases on tens of thousands of unattended machines, with a pull-only broker and nothing exposed to the internet.
  • Drove migrations from PHP and VB.net to Node, TypeScript, and Go. Designed and led a unified internal portal with single sign-on and org-synced RBAC.
  • Rewrote embedded C firmware for in-field vehicle hardware to a server-driven RPC model under tight memory limits.

Projects

Writing

Talks