Jerome Jahnke

Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States

Email: j-jahnke@tormenta.com

Website: https://www.tormenta.com/

Summary

Principal-level engineer and technology leader with 25 years of solving large-scale problems. I set architectural direction, lead design across teams, and build the platforms that let other engineers move faster. Specialties in large-scale internet infrastructure, platform and API design, and access and identity management.

Experience:

Freddie Mac

Senior Director, AI Agent Engineering (2025-present)

  • Lead AI Agent Engineering for Single-Family Acquisition (SFA), building the agent architecture, engineering practices, and team capabilities to put generative AI into production at a regulated financial institution.
  • Set the GenAI adoption strategy across SFA, from model selection and prompt engineering to agent patterns, guardrails, and governance.
  • Building the division's AI capabilities from the ground up.

Tormenta LLC

DevOps Consultant for Freddie Mac (2023-2025)

  • Worked with Single Family Acquisition (SFA) Leadership to make software development faster.
    • To reduce feature cycle times, I helped SFA Leadership propose their own Platform, creating a separation between the business and core platform allowing individual development teams to take more responsibility and thus move faster.
    • To reduce testing and deployment times, we used this new Platform authority to develop a new Continuous Deployment Infrastructure, removing humans from the loop for common infrastructure (databases, file storage, caching, load balancing, etc.)
    • To reduce the required security infrastructure, I worked with the Security Architecture team to propose Zero Trust infrastructure, eliminating the need for certificates for service-to-service communications.
    • To improve delivery times by deploying infrastructure without human intervention, I led a team to develop the software to do this.

Reddit

Staff Engineer (2022-2023)

  • Increased the total number of Ads customers by leading the development of a customer-facing Ads API.
  • Taught the Ads Engineering team how to design consumer APIs by implementing an Ads-wide API Review Process.
  • Increased the speed of adding new ad formats by working with teams across Reddit to consolidate posting logic in one place.

Director Core Platform (2021-2022)

  • To help Reddit retire its monolith, I created an architectural vision and roadmap to describe the move to SOA.
  • Supporting the SOA transformation, I staffed strategic Media and Identity and Access management teams.
  • Improved developer effectiveness by building and staffing a Developer Productivity Team.
  • Reduced environmental issues when moving code to production and overall developer costs by convincing the Reddit Eng to move off of a Vagrant Dev system onto a Kubernetes one the Dev Productivity built.
  • I increased the size of my organization from 8 to 30, including adding three new EMs.
  • Improved the Redditor experience by working with the R2 team to improve overall availability by 0.7%.

Director of Engineering -- Office of the CTO (2019-2021)

  • Encouraged the writing of Design Docs by creating an Enterprise-wide Design Doc process (RAWR).
  • Enabled Staff Engineers across the company to work together on more significant non-product issues by creating the ARCH organization, which developed workstreams each quarter for all of Reddit Engineering to work on.
  • Reduced dependence on Google's AMP and improved the Redditor experience by staffing an engineer to focus on a spike to rewrite Reddit's Mobile Web Browser, which replaced the MWeb browser.
  • Enabled Reddit to safely run Political ads on the site during the 2020 election by staffing an engineer to focus on making it possible to attach ads to the subreddit allowing community moderators to maintain the comments.
  • Reduced risk and redeployed engineers by taking over Reddit Gifts, eliminating the GDPR risk it posed, and stabilizing it so we could gracefully shut it down and move the engineers to the Core Platform.
  • Created a DTC business opportunity by taking two engineers and a graphic designer and started the Snoovatar Builder, which the Economies team turned into their most profitable product.
  • Refined and elevated Reddit Engineering Culture by creating and working on the weekly ARCH newsletter, r/RedditEng, Snoosweek Hackathon, and Tech Team Spotlight Meeting.
  • Improved Marketing for Reddit by managing the 2020 (Imposter) and 2021 (Second) April Fool's pranks and Layer 1 and Layer 2 events with Adobe.

Groupon

Senior Engineering Manager (2015-2019)

  • Improved caching of Deal Catalog to allow for more product flexibility by building a contextual cacher
  • Added the ability to increase inventory for Groupon by implementing an external API allowing third parties to manage their own external inventory.
  • Improved flexibility of the product by implementing the White Label project enabling us to use Groupon under different names (Living Social.)
  • Added inventory by integrating a Coupons system into Groupon
  • Increased flexibility of the Accounting Software by bringing in contractors to maintain the old Clojure system while we rewrote it in Java.
  • Sped up integration between reporting and data warehouse by working with the data warehouse team to support their migration to a new platform.
  • Improved our ability to staff the Accounting Software team by creating better documentation and processes so we could hire contractors to run it while we replaced it.
  • Added staff to new products and reduced the cost of running the Deal Platform and Inventory Service by moving the work to India. They were stable products that had fewer time zone impacts.

Bank of America

Senior Architect -- Global Markets and Research Technologies (2010-2015)

  • Changed how B of A did Risk Management by serving as one of the core developers for the Quartz Risk System
  • Reduced time to deploy software at B of A from 124 days to 1 by developing the hosting system to scale Quartz to 1 million cores
  • Eliminated all the compliance issues associated with spreadsheets by building the Boron Collateral Risk Engine to track SPV Collateral Risk
  • Experimented with ABAC Entitlements by designing and implementing an ABAC Entitlements system prototype

Senior Architect -- Access and Identity Product Engineering (2009-2010)

  • Developed, Championed, and Managed the 5-year IAM Architectural Framework and Roadmap

Senior Technical Manager -- Access and Identity Product Engineering (2002-2009)

  • Responsible for all authentication at the Bank of America
  • Grew systems from 100k transactions per month to over 500k transactions per second
  • Improved Sigma from 4.5 to 5.8
  • Reduced cost of Authentication by more than 5 million a year by consolidation and turning off non-standard systems
  • Reduced testing costs from $90 per hour to $10 with automation and offshoring
  • Grew from 3 engineers to over 120, including ten engineering managers

Motorola

Senior Staff Engineer -- Internet Software Connectivity Group (1999-2002)

  • Developer on the first Multimodal Browser (multiple input and output modalities, received two patents for this work.)
  • Developed the first "over the air" speech recognizer
  • Developed a high-volume distributed text-to-speech server
  • Developed the first low-cost "consumer" Voice Gateway for VoiceXML
  • Developer on the VoiceXML Commercial Gateway team to deliver VoiceXML to 1 million phone lines

Patents:

Education:

University of Chicago

Master of Science, Computer Science (1998-1999)

Skills: