Jay Fallon
Founding Engineer · Platform Architect · Full-Stack Engineer
Summary
Principal-level engineer who designs and operates multi-service production platforms end-to-end. Currently building Knokr, a music-industry platform managing 60,000+ artists, 1,500+ festivals, 1,000+ venues, and 25,000+ events across a federated architecture: three Next.js apps, a Python/FastAPI prediction service, and four BullMQ background workers sharing a single Postgres/Redis/S3 backbone.
Twenty-plus years of engineering experience across enterprise (Dassault Systèmes, Bose, State Street, Cengage) and consumer health (Form Health). Deep on backend architecture, data modeling, and applied ML — pgvector and HNSW indexes, graph algorithms (Node2Vec, Louvain), AI-powered recommendation systems — with a long front-end track record that informs how I build APIs and design systems.
Seeking founding engineer, principal IC, or staff backend roles where one engineer can own architecture and ship across the stack.
Technical Skills
Fluent in English and Spanish
Education
Master of Liberal Arts (ALM) in Digital Media Design · Harvard University
2017 – 2019
Completed Master of Liberal Arts degree in Digital Media Design through Harvard Extension School, focusing on user experience design, interaction design, and digital media production. Developed comprehensive understanding of design principles, user research methodologies, and digital product development.
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Business Administration · Northeastern University
1993 – 1998
Completed Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration with majors in International Business and Finance, focusing on global operations and marketing. Participated in Northeastern's renowned cooperative education program, completing assignments at Boston's Better Snacks, FMRC, and PictureTel, gaining hands-on experience in operations, marketing, technical documentation, and internationalization.
Experience
Founder & Principal Engineer
2024 – PresentKnokr
Sole architect and engineer of a federated music-industry platform spanning a consumer-facing application and an operator/CMS backend. Chose multi-service over monolith from day one: separate Next.js apps, a Python/FastAPI prediction service, and BullMQ workers sharing Postgres, Redis, and S3. Validated each major capability by building six standalone prototypes against the shared production infrastructure — a CLIP-based media platform, a festival prediction engine, a multi-source data ingestion pipeline, a white-label tenant site, an artist-relationship graph, and an AI event curation tool — then graduated five of them into the core services. Designed the schema for a complex domain — entity resolution across artists, venues, festivals, and events; slug stability; ownership transfer; multi-tenant isolation; six-tier RBAC with three-layer route protection. pgvector + HNSW for sub-100ms semantic search. Node2Vec + Louvain on 3.3M co-occurrence edges for artist discovery. Anthropic Claude API for festival recommendations and lineup extraction from posters. ~2,800 tests across the system (Vitest, Playwright, Testcontainers, Supertest, Memlab).
Platform Components
Knokr Lineups (knokr.com)
Public site — city-context discovery across 60K+ artists, 1.5K+ festivals, 1K+ venues, and 25K+ events with semantic + full-text search, calendar/RSVPs, BullMQ-backed reminder pipeline, CLIP-based album search, and mutual-friend-gated messaging
Knokr Base
Multi-tenant admin CMS with database-driven routing, six-tier RBAC (90–95% latency reduction via Redis), graph-based discovery, OpenAI vector search, a five-worker BullMQ pipeline (graph, embedding, insights, social-card, reminder), and a six-strategy data ingestion cascade (JSON-LD → Bandsintown → Songkick → Seated → custom HTML → Claude LLM fallback)
Knokr Predictor
Festival lineup prediction engine — FastAPI service querying 3.3M co-occurrence edges with Louvain scene detection, weighted random sampling, and confidence tiering
Tech Stack: PostgreSQL/Prisma, pgvector, Redis, BullMQ, Node.js, Python/FastAPI, asyncpg, scikit-learn, Pandas, NumPy, Selenium, BeautifulSoup, Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind, Clerk, Stripe, AWS S3/CloudFront, Sentry, Railway, Anthropic Claude API, OpenAI API
Consulting Engineer
2022 – 2024Form Health
Rewrote the front-end from scratch to incorporate the site redesign and built a componentized design-system library used across the platform. Worked with marketing and product teams on the customer-facing platform for a medical weight-loss company; built and maintained the marketing site infrastructure and shared component library. Implemented Storybook documentation and supporting tooling to standardize component usage and reduce front-end fragmentation across teams.
Tech Stack: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Prismic, Storybook
Senior Software Engineering Manager
2021 – 2023Dassault Systèmes SE · Waltham, MA
Senior IC role despite the manager title — hands-on engineer working alongside director-level peers on the SOLIDWORKS Cloud Platform. Implemented and maintained UI features across products to enforce design-system consistency and reduce accumulated technical debt. Designed and built a new content management system serving the entire product suite, replacing fragmented per-product docs. Partnered with new product teams on consumer-facing UIs while keeping product and design language consistent across the portfolio.
Software Engineer (Contract)
2019 – 2021Dassault Systèmes SE · Waltham, MA
Contractor across two products in the SOLIDWORKS Apps for Kids suite.
Rewrote the entire front-end in Angular 1.x, JavaScript, and CSS. Built a componentized design system to unify the separate applications. Consolidated disparate API streams into one structure for easier maintenance. Rewrote the end-to-end test suite using Mocha, Chai, and Puppeteer.
Sole engineer on Classroom — a teacher-facing application for 30,000 students aged 8–14 with classroom and assignment scheduling, grading tools, custom newsletter app, and COPPA-compliant data and account flows. Containerized an Express suite of 12 interdependent services using Docker Compose, replacing manual per-service startup. Introduced a design system the application had never had on a Dassault-licensed customized Angular 1.x build.
Tech Stack: Angular 1.x, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Node.js, Express, Docker, Docker Compose, Mocha, Chai, Puppeteer, Cassandra
Software Engineering & Consulting · Earlier Roles (2000–2019)
Engineering and consulting roles spanning financial services, education, consumer audio, and pharmaceuticals. Full-stack web development, design system architecture, and front-end engineering at scale. Stack depth from this period includes six years of Angular.js, four years of Ruby on Rails, multi-year Express.js applications, and the full pre-React CSS lineage (CSS, SCSS, PostCSS, Stylus). Clients and employers via direct hire and consulting: Bose Corporation, State Street Global Advisors, Cengage Learning, Boston Technologies, netNumina Solutions (Fidelity, State Street, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, ADQSR), and Style Me Pretty.