Jake Spurlock

Resume

Concord, CA (San Francisco Bay Area) · Projects · LinkedIn · GitHub

Senior Director of Forward Deployed Engineering at WordPress VIP and WordPress core committer. Led the WordPress 7.1.3 security release (7 vulnerability fixes, 3 reported by Anthropic) and builds agentic workflows and MCP integrations for enterprise customers. Nearly 20 years shipping software, from WIRED’s publishing platform to six apps built with AI coding tools since 2025.

Experience

Automattic (WordPress VIP), remote, 2018 to present

Senior Director, Forward Deployed Engineering, Jan 2026 to present

  • Technical partner to enterprise customers’ engineering teams, product leaders and executives, covering architecture, performance, AI-enabled workflows and complex integrations.
  • Led Pew Research Center’s AI-readiness engagement (case study): restructured its research so LLMs cite findings and attribution correctly, and launched in one month against a six-month internal estimate. ChatGPT went from sending almost no traffic to Pew’s referrer within 30 days. Moved Pew’s engineers to agentic development, where GitHub issues become agent-built pull requests that engineers review (80% success bar, now close to 99%). The result was Pew’s largest release, about 1.5 million lines changed, 3 to 4 times ahead of plan.
  • Built and demoed an agent that combines WordPress VIP Secure MCP with Salesforce’s MCP at Dreamforce 2026, with no integration code: a visitor’s question becomes a page from the site’s own content, a Salesforce lead and a content brief.

Senior Director, Customer Success, Apr 2023 to Feb 2026

  • Led enterprise account strategy and technical success for WordPress VIP’s largest customers, including global media brands and public sector organizations.
  • Drove technical strategy, architectural guidance and performance work behind multi-million-dollar renewals and expansions.
  • Championed AI-assisted editorial tooling, content analysis and classification pipelines for VIP and customers including TIME and Digital Trends, and advised product teams on safe model integration and content-generation guardrails.
  • Mentored distributed teams of Technical Account Managers and Support Engineers on security, scalability and reliability.

Customer Success Director, Oct 2018 to May 2023

  • Delivered publishing platforms with ESPN, NBC, TIME, NASA and the White House: architectural reviews, React and Node.js integrations, AWS infrastructure guidance and readiness for high-traffic live events.
  • Co-led the 50+ person Premier team and launched VIP’s Public Sector team.

WordPress (open source), contributor since 2014; core committer and Security Release Lead, Feb 2019 to present

  • Release lead for WordPress 7.1.3 (Oct 2026): 7 security fixes and 4 bug fixes coordinated with 34 contributors, backported to every eligible branch back to 4.7. Three of the vulnerabilities were reported by Anthropic.
  • Committed the Secrets API to WordPress 7.2, which stores credentials such as AI provider keys encrypted, with the encryption key kept out of the database.
  • Release Coordinator for WordPress 5.5 (2020), a release from 805 contributors.
  • Run the security and disclosure pipeline for WordPress core: vulnerability triage, cross-ecosystem coordination with hosts and vendors, static analysis improvements, MFA rollout and auto-update reliability.

University of Southern California, Iovine and Young Academy, Adjunct Faculty (graduate programs), 2021 to present

  • Design and teach graduate courses in web development, software engineering, AI-assisted development and product design, covering JavaScript, Node.js, React, version control, CI/CD and open-source contribution.
  • Guide master’s student teams through capstone projects from planning to delivery, and built Traveler to replay student projects commit by commit.

Condé Nast (WIRED), Software Engineer III, San Francisco, Jun 2014 to Oct 2018

  • Built editorial tools used by hundreds of journalists, including Curator, a front-page layout and scheduling system, and worked on the 2015 wired.com redesign with a Node.js front end on the WordPress JSON API.
  • Architected WIRED’s Apple News integration, featured in Apple’s WWDC keynote. Wrote and open-sourced the WordPress Facebook Instant Articles plugin and presented it with Facebook’s open source team at F8.

Maker Media / O’Reilly Media, Web Developer and Web Producer, Sebastopol, CA, Apr 2011 to Jun 2014

  • Built and ran publishing systems serving 7 to 11 million monthly page views, editorial workflows and a REST API for Maker Faire data.

Earlier: Instructor at Stevens-Henager College, Oct 2009 to Apr 2011, teaching interaction design, HTML/CSS and web publishing; earlier web, video and design roles in Utah.

Selected projects

Shipped on nights and weekends with AI coding tools; full list on the Projects page.

  • ScoutSheet (web; iOS and Android coming soon): tryouts and player evaluations for volunteer youth baseball and softball leagues. Its Claude connector is read-only, off until a league Admin enables it, never sends evaluators’ notes or children’s personal data, and logs every read to an audit log.
  • Draft Night (web, open source): Little League draft software built for Walnut Creek Little League and used by leagues across the country.
  • Celluloid (macOS, open source), Today (iOS and Mac RSS reader with on-device Apple Intelligence), WalkUp DJ (iOS), ScriptStrip and Jewel Case (macOS).
  • ANF Validator (VS Code extension, open source): validates Apple News Format files while you edit them.

Writing and talks

  • Bootstrap: Responsive Web Development, O’Reilly Media, 2013, the first book on Bootstrap.
  • AI is the Ultimate Expression of Open Source (2026). Contributor to WordPress VIP’s Future of the Web 2026 report on AI brand visibility and content trust.
  • Dreamforce 2026 (agent demo), Government Service Delivery 2026 (moderator), F8, Maker Faire, WordCamps, and talks on APIs and open-source advocacy.

Skills

PHP, JavaScript and TypeScript (Node.js, React), WordPress core and plugin architecture, iOS, macOS and Android apps, MySQL, Elasticsearch, AWS, CI/CD with GitHub Actions, Kubernetes familiarity; MCP servers and LLM agent workflows; vulnerability response and security release management.

Education

University of Southern California, Iovine and Young Academy, M.S., Integrated Design, Business and Technology, 2019

Utah Valley University, B.S., Digital Media, 2008