Johnny Jacob — Systems & Platform Engineer

Two decades of writing software — from bare-metal firmware to the cloud infrastructure that keeps things running quietly in the background. Right now that means Mendix, before that Intel, and a long trail of open source and detours along the way.

I like problems that don't have obvious answers. And I care about the people building alongside me as much as the code we ship.

Core Expertise

Cloud & Distributed Systems

Multi-tenant SaaS, microservices, Kubernetes — the plumbing that makes large systems work reliably at scale.

Security & Confidential Computing

TEEs, attestation, SGX/TDX — the low-level trust infrastructure most engineers never have to think about.

Systems & Edge Computing

Comfortable from the bootloader up. Linux internals, RTOS, Yocto, embedded gateways — the layer where software meets hardware.

Languages & Tooling

Go and Rust day-to-day, C/C++ when needed, Python when speed doesn't matter. Language is a tool, not an identity.

Technical Interests

01 Kubernetes operators & platform engineering

02 Confidential computing and attestation systems

03 Distributed system design

04 Developer tooling and internal frameworks

05 Open source ecosystems

How I Work

Simplicity first — complexity should be justified, not inherited
Prefer sustainable systems over clever shortcuts
Comfortable at any layer — firmware to Kubernetes
Invest heavily in mentoring and raising engineering standards
If it's hard to operate, it's not done yet

Selected Experience

2025 — Present

Cloud Platform Engineer

Mendix

Working on cloud reliability and lifecycle automation — the unglamorous work that keeps platforms healthy.

2019 — 2025

Tech Lead, Cloud & Confidential Computing

Intel

Tech lead on Intel Trust Authority — a platform for attesting Trusted Execution Environments across clouds. Spent a lot of time thinking about authentication throughput, multi-tenant architecture, and how to ship security infrastructure without making it painful to operate.

10 → 1500 TPS

2011 — 2016

IoT & Embedded Systems Engineer

–

Connected cars, medical sensors, mesh networks for logistics. A lot of C, a lot of hardware constraints, and the particular satisfaction of shipping something that runs for years without being touched.

2006 — 2011

Open Source Engineer, GNOME Ecosystem

Novell

Maintainer of Evolution-MAPI at Novell, contributor across the GNOME ecosystem. Where I learned that open source is mostly about the people, not the code.

Evolution-MAPI Maintainer

Alwayslearning.Alwaysbuilding.

Always
learning.
Always
building.