jake bodea

If we were sitting across a table and you asked me to tell you about myself, this is more or less what I'd say:

Hi, I'm Jake. I'm a Romanian-American from Southern California. I studied math in undergrad, with minors in CS, business analytics, and music. Then I went back for a graduate certificate in AI at Stanford, and these days I help teach two of their machine learning courses online (still a little surreal tbh). I bring that up because I know ML deeply: the math, stats and the neural net architecture underneath, etc... as well as the online buzzwords :)

Right now I'm a "machine learning engineer" at TaxRise, but what I really love is building AI products end to end, and I've gotten to do plenty of that here. I built a fleet of voice AI agents, living in both phone and web apps. I built our main website, including a sales chat interface that funnels leads. I built the document embedding that powers our RAG and classification. Across all of it I get to own the design, the frontend, the model, and the product calls in between, which is exactly how I like to work.

I thrive in areas prioritizing by small teams, fast shipping, and plenty of encouragement to take an idea straight to production. That kind of pace and freedom is the future imo!

Most of my work is in TypeScript, Python, and SQL, and I'm slowly picking up Rust. Honestly though, idrc about the language. Give me something hard in a stack I've never touched and I'll figure it out.

I'm pretty terminally online about all of this. New model releases, AI lab drama, new best practices, whatever paper everyone is arguing about that week... I keep up with it because I genuinely enjoy it. I'm lowkey obsessed, so please bring it up and I'll gladly chop it up with you about any of it haha

Outside of work, I'm a worship leader and youth volunteer at Agape Church, where I serve a few times a week. The rest of my time goes to side projects and chasing adventures with my wife, who somehow puts up with all the late night coding and constant flurry of ideas.

Thanks for checking out my website. Please poke around to see the work, the timeline, some writings, and a few quotes I like. But even better, I'd like to meet you! Please say hi :)