Jason Flatford

Senior/Staff/Founding Engineer · Co-Founder & CTO, NILmetrics · ex-EVP Product

Roanoke, VA • jasonflatford.com/contact • linkedin.com/in/flatford

Summary

Hands-on engineer who ships products from zero to scale. Co-Founder & CTO of NILmetrics, where I architected the scoring engine and data pipeline end to end (~10,000+ D1 athletes scored across 32 conferences). Sole early developer of Melee.gg, which I built and scaled to hundreds of thousands of players and thousands of B2B partners at 99.99%+ uptime (multi-tenant, >2M LoC) before running it as EVP of Product. Concurrently product architect at Occam Systems, a molecular-simulation startup. I build AI-native systems: grounded LLM agent pipelines, RAG, and evals, alongside real-time systems and payments, with the product-leadership range to know what's worth building. Remote.

Signature Outcomes

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: 99.99%+ uptime, 8 languages, adoption across dozens of countries.
Architected a multi-tenant SaaS (>2M LoC) 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

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 – Present • Roanoke, VA

Own product architecture at an early-stage chemistry/molecular-simulation startup, reporting to the President; remit spans architecture plus security, compliance, and infrastructure.
Work 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 (>2M LoC) 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

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, 99.99%+ uptime, 8 languages.
Concierge: Admin platform (registration, seating, staffing, badging, reconciliation) serving ~100k attendees.
Mythic Works: Personal label for sister projects, including 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) for roles requiring a 4-year degree.

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.