Jan Martin Borgersen
I'm a software engineer and team leader who can learn new technologies quickly to solve hard problems. My joy lies in that intersection of art, communication, and computers, where humans interact with machines to create something vibrant and new.
Experience
Google Meet — Senior Software Engineer
The Google Meet Rooms team ensures that hardware solutions work well with Google Meet video conferencing.
As a member of the Rooms Collaboration team, I write technical design documents and software to enable colaborative tools (like digital whiteboards) to function in hybrid meeting environments across a variety of surfaces, including web, mobile, and digital whiteboarding devices. I primarily work in Typescript and Java.
Wowza — Sr. Staff Software Engineer
Wowza provides streaming media solutions to companies where video is critical to their business.
As an engineer for Wowza Clearcaster, I worked with a small team partnered with Facebook Live to build a video encoder device that guarantees broadcaster-quality video ingest to their live streaming video service. We shipped a new hardware product with a cloud-based management UI seven months after concept, allowing broadcasters to control fleets of video encoders remotely. Primary technogies used include ReactJS, GraphQL, and Java. Systems were deployed and managed in the Cloud with Docker and Kubernetes.
As an engineer with knowledge of browser media API's, I built several WebRTC example applications, in both React and JQuery, to help external developers integrate their real-time applications with a Wowza live-streaming solution.
As an engineer with a focus on user experiences, I worked on a small team building Wowza's in-house multi-platform HLS streaming video player. Wowza Player was a crucial piece of Wowza's Ultra Low Latency (3-10s end-to-end latency) solution prior to the standardization of Low Latency HLS. I was awarded a patent with the company's chief architect for our technology that allowed us to leverage work from the Wowza Streaming Engine product and transpile it into client languages including Typescript and Actionscript for delivery to web, iOS, Android, and Flash.
Zazzle — UI Engineering Manager, Software Engineer
Zazzle is a marketplace and design platform for custom and customizable products.
I was the first UI developer and third software engineer hired by the Zazzle founders. Over time I became the UI Engineering manager, leading and mentoring a team of up to 10 engineers responsible for delivering the user-facing features of Zazzle platform. We built a rich web framework in C# and Javascript that scaled Zazzle's online customization business into a global consumer marketplace. Revenue grew 20x between 2005-2014.
As UI engineers, we worked with product, marketing, creative, and core engineering teams to deliver the experiences on Zazzle.com. We prototyped, user-tested, enabled site localization, instrumented for site-analytics and AB testing, optimized for SEO, redesigned as a mobile-first web application, and continuously delivered production code.
Web UI Consultant
The Cisco.com website organizes and delivers hundreds of thousands of pages of content supporting Cisco's numerous product lines.
As an analyst for the team maintaining centralized website components, I created internal standards and processes for Section 508 and W3C accessibility compliance (precursors to the Web Accessibility Initiative) ahead of the 2005 Cisco.com redesign.
eBay — Sr. XSL Developer
As a user-focused developer at eBay, I wrote XSL code that generated website components (HTML and Javascript) to support interactions with attributes and catalog-driven metadata on both search results and product pages.
Razorfish — Web Interface Developer Lead
Razorfish was an early and influential digital consultancy, helping companies bring their presence to the Web.
I led front-end web development teams for several Razorfish clients including Cisco Systems. After Cisco grew by acquisition in the 90's, Razorfish helped deliver a data and content restructuring of their website to create a unified web experience across dozens of product lines.
Sun — Java Sound Framework Engineer
I was an early Java/C (JNI) developer on the java.media.sound implementation available in Java Standard Edition since version 1.2.
Education
UNC - Chapel Hill
Master of Science. Computer Science.
Studied distributed real-time systems and multimedia applications with Professors Kevin Jeffay and Don Smith.
NC State University
Bachelor of Science. Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering.
John T. Caldwell Scholar (highest 4yr award), Thomas J. Watson IBM Scholar.
North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
Two-year residential high school.
Community
Cub Scout Leadership — Pack 374, San Jose, CA
As Cubmaster from 2019-2021, I led Pack-level activity programming with our leadership committee, frequently making a fool of myself in front of several dozen elementary school kids.
As Den Leader from 2014-2018, I led a group of 2nd-5th grade boys on their journey through Cub Scouting. We went camping and hiking, learned how to use pocket knives and build fires, raced Pinewood Derby cars, made and edited movies, and volunteered in the community via events like Relay for Life and food drives.
Art Vistas Docent — Oster Elementary
As an Art Vistas docent in our local elementary school, I volunteered to teach K-5th grade children the fundamentals of Art and Fine Art, and lead art projects in the classroom.