Jason Flatford
Fractional CTO · Co-Founder & CTO, NILmetrics · ex-EVP Product
Roanoke, VA • jasonflatford.com/contact • linkedin.com/in/flatford
Summary
Fractional CTO. I have built software that people run their operations on since 2008: Concierge at StarCityGames, audit-log tooling at Foresite, then Melee.gg, which I started as its only developer and ran for six years as EVP of Product while it grew to hundreds of thousands of players and thousands of organizers. I designed and built the PostSecret Searchable Archive as its volunteer technical lead, with Automattic's Special Projects team. Today I am Co-Founder and CTO of NILmetrics, my own company, and I am delivering a fixed-price platform build for Onslow Community Outreach's Christmas Cheer program. Hands-on across .NET and C#, TypeScript and Next.js, Python and FastAPI, Java and Kotlin, on AWS, Azure and Vercel. Based in Roanoke, Virginia.
Signature Outcomes
- Designed and built the PostSecret Searchable Archive as a volunteer, with Automattic's Special Projects team: about 14,000 secrets searchable by text, feeling or meaning in one ranking, with moderation behind a single visibility gate.
- Building Christmas Cheer (2026) for Onslow Community Outreach on a fixed-price contract, with the code owned by the nonprofit.
- Co-founded NILmetrics (2026); built the scoring engine, ingestion pipeline, and admin/portal platform end-to-end; ~10,000+ D1 athletes scored across 32 conferences.
- Scaled Melee.gg from launch to a global platform used by hundreds of thousands of players and thousands of organizer partners: high availability, 8 languages, adoption across dozens of countries.
- Architected a multi-tenant SaaS (millions of lines of code) with RBAC/ABAC, audit logging, real-time analytics, and PCI-aware payments.
- Hardened cloud & reliability: migrated Azure to AWS (ECS/RDS/Redis/CloudWatch) on Terraform IaC with Cloudflare WAF/CDN, improving resilience, observability, and release cadence.
- Won and delivered with global brands: Wizards of the Coast, Disney, Red Bull, Ravensburger, Fantasy Flight Games.
Experience
Onslow Community Outreach (Christmas Cheer), via Mythic Works LLC • Contract Developer & Technical Lead
Oct 2026 - Present • Remote
- Fixed-price agreement with Onslow Community Outreach, a North Carolina nonprofit, to deliver the platform that runs its Christmas Cheer program for the 2026 season.
- Building it from an empty codebase: TypeScript, Next.js and React, PostgreSQL on Neon, hosted on Vercel.
- Client entry screens that families use at the Christmas Cheer Center, with an assistant, to confirm their household and answer their own application questions; production targeted for late October 2026.
- Sign-in with passkeys, authenticator apps and family phone codes via Better Auth.
- Set up a GitHub organization in the nonprofit's name so it owns its code, with GitHub, Vercel and Neon configuration managed as Terraform.
NILmetrics • Co-Founder & CTO
Mar 2026 - Present • Roanoke, VA / Remote
- Co-founded to build the first independent valuation platform for college athlete NIL deals: a composite score combining performance, social reach, and market comparables.
- Architected the scoring engine, data pipeline, and admin/portal platform end-to-end (Next.js 16, PostgreSQL + Drizzle, Auth.js v5, Tailwind v4, Vercel, GitHub Actions).
- Built ingestion that tracks ~10,000+ D1 basketball athletes and ~700+ teams across 32 conferences; daily/weekly/manual sync modes on GitHub Actions cron.
- Designed the marketing surface, authenticated dashboard for collectives/brands/agents/coaches, and admin tooling with authenticated workflow dispatch.
- Currently in closed beta with select partners.
Occam Systems, Incorporated • Senior Developer, Product Architecture
Apr 2026 - Sep 2026 • Roanoke, VA
- Owned product architecture at an early-stage chemistry/molecular-simulation startup, reporting to the President; remit spanned architecture plus security, compliance, and infrastructure.
- Worked across a 28-module Spring Boot/Maven monorepo (RDF modeling, allocation optimization, materials API, graph viz), Python/FastAPI services, and Next.js/TypeScript surfaces on Terraform-provisioned Azure.
- Set the team's web standard: replacing legacy Jinja2 + HTMX surfaces with Next.js + React + TypeScript.
Keyrune Incorporated · Melee.gg • EVP, Product
2019 - 2025 • Remote / Roanoke, VA
- Designed and delivered a multi-tenant SaaS (millions of lines of code) spanning registration, decklists, pairings/standings, ticketing/payments, analytics, audit logging, and live-ops.
- Shipped real-time experiences (SignalR/WebSockets) and live-ops dashboards that let a lean team run marquee events with thousands of players.
- Owned product direction and roadmap end to end while staying hands-on; scaled it to hundreds of thousands of players and thousands of B2B organizers with lean resources.
- Implemented multilingual/i18n, regionalized taxes/fees, and PCI-aware Stripe payments incl. chargebacks and reconciliation.
- Embedded LLM-assisted analytics and internal tools to reduce manual workflows.
Flattsware LLC (Melee.gg origin) • Founder & President → CTO
2019 - 2022 • Manchester, CT / Remote
- Launched Melee (Mar 2020) and drove rapid early growth (roughly a thousand new users a week); hosted Red Bull Untapped (the largest independently run Arena event at the time, thousands of players) and SCG Tour Online series.
- Delivered professional events for Wizards of the Coast during the online era; operated hundreds of tournaments with six-figure revenue across series.
- Established release cadence, decklist ingestion/validation, and global adoption across dozens of countries; introduced Japanese language support.
Foresite LLC • Software Developer
2012 - 2014 • Manchester, CT & Roanoke, VA (Hybrid)
- Built portal UI/UX and automation for network-device audit-log classification and rules management (Drools) using Grails/Groovy/Java (Spring) and PostgreSQL.
- Developed microservices to parse/normalize high-volume logs; delivered data-grid tooling (JavaScript/jQuery/DataTables/Bootstrap) that reduced manual triage.
StarCityGames.com • Event Rep → Coordinator of Event Operations & Technical Lead
2008 - 2012 • Roanoke, VA (travel)
- Led operations for large-scale TCG events (1k+ players); owned logistics, staff training, and on-site IT.
- Designed and launched Concierge, an admin-only event platform centralizing registration, seating/pairings, staffing, badge printing/scanning, cash recon, and reporting; served ~100k attendees.
Earlier Experience
Eagle Boat Docks · Director of Drafting & Design • 2001 - 2010
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) · Personal Service Contractor (School-to-Work) • 2002 - 2003
Selected Projects
- Duly (civic tech, soft-launched 2025, no longer active): Constituent-communications platform for elected officials' offices. Verified constituent identity; AI summarization of inbound messages by topic, sentiment and urgency, with deduplication; staff dashboards with escalation handling; anonymized public transparency portals. Soft-launched and demoed to multiple elected officials.
- NILmetrics: Composite scoring + dashboards for college athlete NIL valuation. Stack: Next.js 16, Postgres + Drizzle, Auth.js, Vercel, GitHub Actions. Coverage: ~10,000+ D1 athletes, 32 conferences; serves collectives, brands, agents, coaches. Closed beta.
- Melee.gg: Registration, decklists, pairings/standings, payments, analytics, live-ops. Outcomes: hundreds of thousands of players, thousands of organizers, high availability, 8 languages.
- Concierge: Admin platform (registration, seating, staffing, badging, reconciliation) serving ~100k attendees.
- Mythic Works: Personal label for sister projects, including Procrastitask (App Store iPhone app: server-owned escalation engine, native AlarmKit alarm, hosted MCP server for agent access), Mythic Decks (autonomous daily Arena Brawl publishing), Memnai (instant dashboards from databases & APIs), and others.
Education
AAS, Drafting & Design · ITT Technical Institute
Bachelor's-equivalent professional experience (15+ years).
Skills & Platforms
Architecture: Multi-tenant SaaS; modular monoliths/microservices; real-time (SignalR/WebSockets); APIs (REST/GraphQL); auth/SSO (OAuth2/OIDC/SAML); RBAC/ABAC; observability; perf & caching.
Data & AI: Claude/Anthropic integration; grounded LLM agent pipelines; RAG; evals & guardrails; tool use/function calling; pgvector; real-time analytics; SQL/NoSQL; data modeling.
Stacks: Next.js 16 / React / TypeScript; ASP.NET / C#; Kotlin / Java (Spring Boot); Python / FastAPI; Node; React Native; GraphQL; Tailwind.
Cloud/DevOps: AWS (ECS/RDS/Lambda/CloudFront/CloudWatch); Azure (App Service, Azure SQL, IaC); Vercel; Docker; Terraform; GitHub Actions; Cloudflare; blue-green/canary; cost control.
Security: Audit logging; least-privilege IAM; privacy by design (GDPR/CCPA); PCI awareness; SOC-2/HIPAA awareness; incident mgmt.
Product Leadership (differentiator): Strategy; discovery; outcome roadmaps; PLG; pricing/packaging; GTM; change mgmt; org design & hiring; C-suite/Board comms.
Timeline
Launches, milestones and partnerships, in date order.
Began a fixed-price platform build for Onslow Community Outreach's Christmas Cheer program
Contract developer and technical lead, through Mythic Works LLC, building the platform that runs the Christmas Cheer program for Onslow Community Outreach, a North Carolina nonprofit, for the 2026 season. TypeScript, Next.js and React, PostgreSQL on Neon, hosted on Vercel.
Shipped Procrastitask to the App Store - escalating reminders with agent access
Built and released an iPhone app whose reminders escalate until the task is closed, and whose accountability can be shared with a partner or roommate. The server owns the clock through a per-minute sweep, must-not-miss tasks ring a native iOS 26 AlarmKit alarm, and a hosted MCP server with 15 tools lets a user point their own AI agent at their own account. Python/FastAPI on AWS App Runner with Neon Postgres, Expo and React Native on the client, built solo without a Mac.
Built PostSecret's searchable digital archive as volunteer technical lead
Volunteer technical lead and primary engineer for PostSecret's digital archive - roughly 14,000 anonymous postcard secrets made searchable. Built on WordPress and hosted on Automattic's Pressable, with semantic search (embeddings + a Qdrant vector database), automatic facet classification, a content-moderation pipeline, and cloud-based ingestion. Working directly with founder Frank Warren and Automattic's Special Projects team.
Joined Occam Systems as Senior Developer, Product Architecture
Joined Occam Systems, Incorporated (an early-stage chemistry/molecular simulation startup), reporting to President James Ferri. Spanned product architecture plus adjacent technical work across security, compliance, and infrastructure.
Co-founded NILmetrics - institutional-grade NIL valuation for college athletes
Co-founded NILmetrics as CTO. Architected the scoring engine, ingestion pipeline, and admin/portal platform - Next.js 16, Postgres + Drizzle, Auth.js v5, Vercel, GitHub Actions. Composite score combining performance, social reach, and market comparables across ~10,000+ Division I basketball athletes. Currently in closed beta with select partners.
Launched StudyLens - "Ground News for science"
Shipped studylens.org, an AI-powered platform that extracts facts from nutrition research papers, flags methodological concerns (p-hacking, surrogate endpoints, causal overclaims), analyzes media coverage accuracy, and teaches evidence literacy - built with Next.js 16, Claude structured extraction, Inngest pipelines, and Neon Postgres.
Launched Reveillark - daily MTG card-guessing game
Shipped a Wordle-inspired daily game for Magic: The Gathering with progressive SVG card masking, deterministic puzzle generation via seeded PRNG, and instant autocomplete across 2,841 legendary creatures - entirely client-side with zero backend.
Memnai - Early Access launch
Launched Early Access for Memnai, a schema-aware BI platform that generates SQL and API requests from plain English. Patent pending. Seeking a sales co-founder.
Launched Domain Triage - batch domain availability checker
Shipped a full-stack serverless domain checker with TypeScript monorepo (React 19 + Hono), DNS/RDAP evidence model, DynamoDB caching, and Terraform-managed AWS infrastructure running at ~$0.50/month.
Shipped The Grid Games website - local gaming store in Manchester, CT
Built a 5-page Astro static site for a 30-year-old gaming store with dark gaming aesthetic, comprehensive local SEO structured data (LocalBusiness, Event, BreadcrumbList), data-driven JSON content, and Terraform-managed GitHub Pages hosting at zero cost.
Launched People's Economy Hub - household economic data made accessible
Shipped a non-partisan platform translating BLS, Federal Reserve, and FRED data into three household-centered metrics with automated data pipelines, Zod validation, zero-cost GitHub Pages infrastructure, and WCAG AA accessibility.
Launched SnappyCVs - AI-powered resume tailoring SaaS
Shipped a full-stack SaaS platform that uses AI to score job fit, generate tailored resumes and cover letters, and track applications through the hiring pipeline.
Launched Slotomancer - cross-platform roguelike with hexagonal architecture
Shipped a wizard-themed roguelike slot-battler simultaneously on desktop (Tauri) and mobile (Expo) from a single codebase using hexagonal architecture, achieving ~100% code sharing.
Launched Mythic Works LLC consultancy website with AI-powered Website Grader
Shipped mythicworks.net - a static HTML/CSS/JS consultancy site (launched on Terraform-managed AWS, now on Vercel) with an AI-powered Website Grader grading sites across 6 categories using Google PageSpeed and Claude.
Soft-launched Duly - AI workflows for civic operations (pre-alpha)
Early-access release focused on natural-language intake and automation for elected officials and constituents. Orchestrates requests into structured workflows, routes tasks to the right teams, and generates status updates and summaries. Built with multi-tenant governance and auditable runs to support public-sector requirements. No pilot signed, and the project is no longer active.
The Endless Grimoire - idle mobile game (pre-MVP)
Pre-MVP prototype in React Native/Expo focused on core loops (gather → automate → cast). Built a single-source-of-truth stats/modifier engine powering workers & accelerators, a JSON-driven spellbook (active/passive grid with adjacency unlocks, cooldowns, and haptics), offline progression/reconciliation, and geometric pricing.
Left Keyrune Incorporated to focus on other projects
Transitioned from Keyrune Incorporated to pursue new opportunities and projects.
Implemented a fully-fledged tournament decklist API for any trading card game; specifically for Star Wars: Unlimited.
Developed a comprehensive decklist API for trading card games; supports rules enforcement, decklist validation, and more; enhances tournament management capabilities.
Upgraded Melee.gg to support more games; Worked with Ravensburger to launch Disney Lorcana tournaments
Expanded Melee.gg's capabilities to support additional games; collaborated with Ravensburger to launch Disney Lorcana tournaments.
Co-founded Keyrune Incorporated
Co-founded Keyrune Incorporated to develop and maintain Melee.gg.
Internationalization: Launched Melee.gg Japanese language support
Localised UI and content, opening APAC growth channel.
Delivered tournaments on every continent (except Antarctica); users across dozens of countries
Expanded global operations and community participation across regions.
Six-figure WotC Mythic Invitational & Season Grand Finals delivered
Platform of record for flagship, broadcast events across consecutive months.
Signed enterprise partnership with Wizards of the Coast
Secured enterprise partnership; Melee selected for premier events.
Melee.gg powered the largest independent online MTG tournament for Red Bull Untapped, with thousands of players
Record-setting online tournament operated end-to-end on Melee.gg.
Public launch of Melee.gg
Led product from concept to GA; multi-tenant tournament SaaS for global events.
Founded Flattsware LLC
Created Flattsware LLC to develop and maintain Melee.gg; focused on esports SaaS solutions.
Started working on Melee.gg
Envisioned a platform to empower esports organizers; initial development phase.
Joined Foresite LLC as Software Developer
Delivered UI/UX for enterprise cybersecurity tools and built log-parsing microservices to speed classification and triage at scale.
Became a certified Level Three Magic Judge
Achieved Level Three certification (only 100 L3s out of 6,000 judges globally); led 100's of unique teams and events; mentored judges and TOs; contributed to the Magic community.
Concierge's first full production event: Grand Prix London
A registration line of about 100 people cleared in about ten minutes, with effectively zero wait for the rest of the three-day event. Concierge went on to serve about 100,000 attendees.
Designed my third custom home for a client
Created detailed architectural plans for a custom home; integrated client feedback and design principles.
Started J.F. Design, a freelance drafting and design business
Provided CAD services for residential and commercial projects; built a client base and honed business skills.
Started volunteering as a Magic Judge and Tournament Organizer
Became a certified Magic Judge; organized local tournaments and events, enhancing community engagement.
Designed solar panel array for commercial marina
Created detailed plans for a solar panel array to power a commercial marina; integrated renewable energy solutions into design.
Started at StarCityGames.com, later Coordinator of Event Operations & Technical Lead
Technical lead for large-scale TCG tournaments; designed and launched the Concierge event platform; coordinated hundreds of event teams.
Graduated with AAS in Drafting and Design
Focused on CAD and 3D modeling; foundational skills in design and engineering.
Graduated from Union County High School
Completed high school with a focus on technical subjects.
Selected for school-to-work program with Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
Converted paper blueprints to CAD; gained early exposure to engineering workflows.
Started job at Eagle Boat Docks as Director of Drafting and Design
Led drafting and design; designed custom boat docks and marinas; honed leadership and design skills.
Won third in an invite-only state Drafting competition
Competed against top students in the state; recognized for technical drawing skills.
