Across every team, no matter the role, the humans behind Onebrief are our superpower. Throughout this blog series, we'll spotlight Onebrief-ers across the organization and share a behind-the-scenes look at their contributions, their inspiration, and stories of their successes, failures, and most profound professional memories.

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Q: Tell us about yourself!

I’m a software engineer on Team Collaborator, the group focused on everything collaborative in the Onebrief platform, from comments and sharing to user group access and management. Day-to-day, I build new features, fix bugs, and dig into user incidents to figure out what went wrong and how to make it right. I also spend a lot of time talking through software designs and implementation strategies with my teammates, which is one of the most important parts of the job.

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Q: Tell us how you came to Onebrief and why.

​​I hit a point in my career where I was looking for a place where I could really mature as an engineer - somewhere I could tackle problems I hadn’t faced before. I’d worked in an e-commerce startup environment and then moved into government contracting, but I was eager to do work that felt even more impactful.

During the interview process at Onebrief, I was immediately drawn in. The mission and focus areas were exciting, but what really stuck with me was the people. Everyone I met was ambitious, mission-driven, and forward-thinking, and it was clear they cared deeply about solving meaningful problems.

I was especially intrigued by the technical challenges Onebrief was tackling. I’d never built products for classified networks or for users on very low-power devices like thin clients. How do you make something fast, reliable, and usable under those constraints?

The prospect of figuring that out — designing elegant solutions where resources are limited and stakes are high — was exactly the kind of challenge I needed.

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Q: What’s your superpower?

If I had to pick a superpower, it would be my ability to connect the right people at the right time. I have a knack for identifying and coordinating the mix of people and tapping into their strengths when we’re designing or building features, especially when our work overlaps with other teams. I enjoy making sure the process flows smoothly so our architecture and implementation benefit everyone in the long run.

Beyond that, mentorship is where I really thrive. Helping new team members ramp up, build confidence, and start contributing is incredibly fulfilling. For me, the best engineering work happens through partnership — learning from each other, tackling challenges together, and building something bigger than any one of us.

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Q: Tell us about one of the most compelling projects you’ve worked on. 

At the start of  2025, just six months into my time at the company, we were facing a unique challenge over the holiday season. We needed to completely rebuild a core part of our product — the card library — to meet the scale of how our users were now operating. Usage had exploded over the previous months, and the existing library, while functional, couldn’t keep up with the complexity of real-world plans being created on the platform.

For background, if you’re not familiar with how Onebrief works, all metadata is stored in cards. They’re the foundation of everything in the platform - its how users build products, organize, and share information. 

Needless to say, the problem wasn’t small. Our earlier library could only handle basic card functions. But users needed much more:

• The ability to manage both cards and lists
• Fast, flexible search, sort, and filter tools
• Richer metadata — like where cards appeared across plans
• Inline editing, instead of opening each card individually

We knew this would take at least eight weeks of focused work. Instead, because of scheduling constraints, we had to deliver in four. That meant compressing what should have been six weeks of development while ensuring the new version was stable, performant, and intuitive.

We were a team of three: small, focused, and highly communicative. It was my first project with this group, and it turned out to be one of the best learning experiences of my career. We evaluated and tested multiple third-party libraries, iterating rapidly to find a foundation that would let us extend functionality without compromising performance. High-frequency communication became our lifeline — daily standups, async updates, constant sharing of micro-demos and quick fixes.

From a technical standpoint, this project was particularly compelling. It forced us to maintain reactivity to keep the card and list information synced across entire plans while considering performance as a top priority. Our goal was to avoid users’ computers having to do a ton of work and calculations every time they update a card or list in their plan. This was NOT an easy task to plan or wrap your head around. It took a lot of careful planning and analysis to step through our state management and UI data flows and ensure that only the most immediate needs were computed to keep UI presentation accurate with data in our state.

By the end, we shipped a card library that not only met the immediate user need but changed the way people interacted with Onebrief. For the first time, users could manage cards across entire plans instead of updating them piecemeal — a huge step forward in usability and efficiency.

That project reshaped how I approach engineering collaboration. It taught me the power of small, aligned teams working in short, intense bursts of focus — and how communication can turn an impossible deadline into a product that genuinely transforms how users work.

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Q: What most excites you about the work you’re doing at Onebrief?

The problems we are solving are hard. We are doing things that require software systems to be in a resilient, functional state despite our users not always able to be connected. I like that we aim to build simplified solutions while tackling a deep level of complexity in our problem space. Nothing pushes an engineer further than working through difficulties like this and facing setbacks (even a few times) along the way until we get there.

The people I work with are brilliant. There aren't many days I can recall where either some technical theoretical concept I had not learned about previously gets mentioned or explained, or someone brings up a new design strategy we have yet to utilize in our day-to-day engineering tasks that helps address a pain point for our team. This constant discovery and learning cycle that happens naturally by way of having incredible peers is what I love about having great teammates. And I hope to share my own knowledge and findings with my colleagues here at Onebrief as I grow in the same way so many have already done for me here.

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Join Jesses' team; we're hiring! 

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