gravedevelopment
Jen M. Graves

Jen M. Graves

Tech lead — building production APIs as a product (Go, C#, gRPC)

About

I'm a tech lead at a brokerage firm, responsible for the development and maintenance of our public REST API. It's one of the company's first-class products — built for institutional trading firms and programmatic traders rather than just serving our own applications. That changes the job: versioning, backwards compatibility, documentation, and latency aren't internal niceties, they're part of the product.

Lately a good deal of my work is in gRPC. We run a microservice architecture and are moving service-to-service and streaming traffic onto gRPC to cut latency across the platform — for now that's internal, not something we expose to external clients.

I lead a team of five: setting standards, mentoring, and proposing and designing the architecture we build (with an architecture office to review and sharpen it). I've contributed to the design of our streaming services and to adding cryptocurrency trading support — mostly teamwork, which is usually where the good work comes from.

Building with AI

A current focus, both at work and on my own, is developing alongside AI partners like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code. With my team I'm helping put AI development strategies into practice — leaning on spec-driven development (SDD) to keep AI-assisted work grounded in clear, reviewable intent — and more broadly I'm contributing to a department-wide effort to standardize how we build with AI. A lot of that is cross-team work, which is how my firm tends to operate.

What I work with

Languages

  • Go
  • C#
  • Python
  • SQL
  • Rust (learning)

AI-assisted development

  • Agentic development
  • Spec-driven development
  • GitHub Copilot
  • Claude Code

APIs & protocols

  • REST
  • gRPC

Platform & infrastructure

  • Kubernetes
  • AWS
  • Docker

Data & caching

  • SQL Server
  • Redis / Dragonfly

Observability

  • Datadog
  • Prometheus
  • OpenTelemetry

The path here

  1. Tech lead / principal developer — brokerage firm

    Own the trading API platform and lead a team of five. Day to day: API design and maintenance, gRPC migration, standards, mentoring, and architecture proposals.

  2. API engineer — same firm

    Joined the API team as a consultant, came on full time, and worked my way up to the lead role.

  3. Consultant — software consulting firm

    Started in mobile development, then branched into SQL and API work — where I found what I actually wanted to do.

Off the clock

I'm happiest in a terminal — building CLI tools and TUIs, mostly in Go, and currently picking up Rust (partly because I'll need it at work soon). I run my own infrastructure too: this site, a self-hosted Forgejo instance, and the AWS and Terraform behind them. I have a soft spot for small, fast, zero-build websites; most sites that should be simple end up buried under tooling, and I'd rather they didn't.

Away from screens I'm a steady reader (sci-fi and non-fiction, with detours into fantasy and the classics), a committed tea drinker, an enthusiastic-if-unreliable plant keeper, and an occasional photographer.