The person behind Prickles Tech
About Jake Prickett
I'm Jake Prickett — Engineering Leader and founder of Prickles Tech LLC, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I've spent the last decade building platforms at enterprise scale, working alongside senior leadership and some of the brightest minds in tech to solve complex architecture and platform challenges.
Prickles Tech is where that experience meets independent consulting. I work directly with teams on AI and agentic development, platform architecture, developer experience, CI/CD pipelines, and technical leadership — bringing the same systems-level thinking that scaled platforms to 26 countries and 20+ teams, now available on a project or advisory basis.
Notable Experience
Ford Motor Company
Engineering LeaderBuilt the mobile foundations for automotive applications deployed across 26 countries, leading cross-functional teams through platform architecture, developer experience improvements, and large-scale mobile infrastructure.
Meijer
Principal Software EngineerLed engineering teams scaling an ecommerce platform to support an expanding retail and advertisement market across 20+ teams — focused on platform strategy, developer productivity, and agentic development initiatives.
What I Write About
This site is where I write about what I've learned the hard way — from basics to advanced topics, anything that's on the mind. Platform architecture, developer tooling, CI/CD pipelines, agentic development, and whatever I'm experimenting with this week. Honest notes from real projects, not sanitized conference-talk versions.
Beyond the Office
I'm a dad first — two kids who are somehow already interested in how things work, which is either flattering or a sign I talk about systems too much. My wife keeps me grounded; she is the more interesting one.
Outside of work you'll find me on a river with a fly rod (catch-and-release, mostly Grand Rapids–area streams), perfecting a Neapolitan pizza in a backyard oven, or on a golf course reminding myself that humility is a virtue.
I also run a home server room that started as a simple DNS-level blocker and has since grown into a full infrastructure obsession. Today that includes dedicated Mac infrastructure for self-hosted AI inference, edge computing with devices like the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super for exploring the hardware, software, and AI intersection, smarter networking, self-hosted services, and Raspberry Pi-style projects that are constantly pushing into new territory. It's where enterprise patterns meet real-world constraints — and where most of the good ideas come from.
I also cook a lot — mostly Italian, because my grandmother would haunt me if I didn't.
Get in Touch
I'm always interested in good conversations about platform architecture, developer tooling, agentic development, or anything in the frontend and mobile platform space. Drop me a line.