---
title: "About — The engineering record | Jake Williams"
canonical: https://jakeawilliams.com/about/
description: "Jake Williams builds and runs enterprise data platforms at Vantage, a specialty insurer — CDC/streaming on Kafka, core domains of the governed Snowflake lakehouse, and the Claude plugin marketplace (12 plugins, six domains, analyst to C-suite). AWS certified, ex-State Farm, author of the open-source Waybill plugin. Open to senior data-platform and AI/agent engineering roles — and AVP-level leadership in financial services."
---

# The engineering record.
The short version: I'm a data & AI platform engineer at Vantage, a specialty insurer, where I own the enterprise CDC/streaming platform, build core domains of the governed lakehouse, and spearheaded the Claude plugin marketplace — 12 plugins across six business domains, used analyst to C-suite. I'm AWS certified and came up through State Farm. On the side I ship small iOS apps — good practice in constraints. I run, I practice yoga, and I build things that hold up under load.
Open to senior data-platform and AI/agent engineering roles — and AVP-level platform leadership in financial services : the job I already do — owning the platform, building the agents, and running the people side of adoption.

01 · The platform I joined early enough to sit on the committee that designed the enterprise data architecture — data lake, EDW, reporting layer — as its reporting architect, and helped build the core reporting solution the company scaled on. Later I inherited a half-built CDC/replication platform when its senior engineer left; I shipped it, re-architected it onto Kafka on Kubernetes ($30K+/yr saved) , and it's been mine end to end since.
The platform's most consequential layer now is semantic: I created the Claude plugin marketplace — architected it, authored the domain skills, and run its roadmap, evaluations, governance, and support. Business leaders at every level, C-suite included, build QBRs, reserve reviews, and financial reports from it. Everything ships as code, observability included.
The leadership half of the job: code reviews, mentoring, office hours driving adoption of AI-assisted development — serving every level of the business and translating in both directions. Along the way I also built a key component of the enterprise pricing tool (a TypeScript microservice on Azure — GraphQL, MCP, PostgreSQL), wrote SOC 2 SOPs and supported audits, and put adoption decisions on usage analytics.

02 · Side projects — in the open The clearest reading of the quality bar is public. Waybill is an MIT-licensed Claude Code plugin for token accounting on AI-assisted work — deterministic attribution, conservation checks, verification packs a recipient can re-run offline — with the code and docs in the open, so the standard is inspectable, not asserted. There's also a side project on the App Store: QuotedAI , a SwiftUI/HealthKit app with on-device AI and 2K+ downloads. The phone is a strict teacher of constraints — memory, battery, offline — and every lesson transfers straight back to platform work.

03 · Timeline
### Vantage Risk — Data Engineer III, Platform & Semantic Analytics
CDC/streaming platform owner · created the Claude plugin marketplace · core lakehouse domains · observability as code · SOC 2 stewardship

2024 — present

### Vantage Risk — Reporting Analyst & Architect
Co-designed the enterprise data architecture (lake, EDW, reporting layer) on the core design committee · built the reporting solution the company scaled on · promoted to Data Engineer

2023 — 2024

### State Farm — Data Analyst
Data governance for P&C analytics groups · Agile migration of analytics workloads to AWS Redshift · designed and ran the team's AWS training program

2021 — 2023

### Independent Contractor — data, analytics & technology
Built client data, analytics, and technology platforms — flagship: Laughlin River Tours' full stack (automated data pipelines, AWS QuickSight dashboards over Glue-combined sources, trend analysis); payment processing (Stripe) and menu systems for Laughlin Ice @ Regency Casino; additional solutions for WrapWorks Las Vegas and others

2016 — 2021

### Earlier — analytics & operations
Analyst and operator roles across hospitality and property management — founded and ran a small business (Entrepreneur of the Year nominee) and built a table-management application at Arizona Snowbowl with $100K+ in cost avoidance

2012 — 2016

04 · Certifications & education AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner B.S. Business Administration & Management — Northern Arizona University
“The platform, the numbers, and the person — built to hold up under load.”
The fastest way to see if we should talk: read the flagship case study , then email me.
Email info@jakeawilliams.com