Adam Jacob
CEO at System Initiative
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar
Top expert inCloud Infrastructure and Automation Engineering
Adam Jacob is a veteran software and infrastructure leader with 19 years of experience building and scaling developer-focused tools and automation platforms from San Francisco. As former CTO of Chef Software and now CEO of System Initiative, he blends deep hands-on engineering—particularly in Ruby-based back-end systems—with product leadership and operational rigor. His open-source work includes significant contributions to foundational projects like Chef, Ohai, Omnibus and Habitat, where he improved core run-list logic, system profiling, build tooling, and service management. Adam’s expertise spans DevOps, build systems, and distributed service orchestration, and he has repeatedly focused on reliability, reproducible builds, and cross-platform packaging. He’s as comfortable refactoring complex codepaths and build pipelines as he is shaping company strategy, and his career shows a pattern of moving low-level systems improvements into broadly adopted platform features. An underappreciated strength is his long history of bridging developer tooling and production operations, turning operational pain points into polished platform capabilities.
18 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (53)
test-kitchen10
git10
json10
docker10
system-configuration10
back-end-development10
configuration-management10
server-configuration10
bash10
command-execution10
dockers10
cicd10
facter10
ruby10
script10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
chef/chef
Mar 2008 - Dec 2016
Chef Infra, a powerful automation platform that transforms infrastructure into code automating how infrastructure is configured, deployed and managed across any environment, at any scale
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1186 commits, 9 PRs, 7 pushes in 8 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Adam's commits primarily focus on improving the core functionality of Chef Infra, specifically related to method missing lookups, run list expansion, and server-side functionalities. The contributions involved fixing bugs and adding features such as handling auto-vivification on read, expanding the run list if requested, adding support to the CouchDB and Nanite features, and ensuring a correct version metadata. The commits touch upon various aspects of the Chef Infra codebase, indicating a focus on maintaining and enhancing the software's internal workings and stability.
devopsdeploymentansibleinfrastructureinfra
habitat-sh/core-plans
Nov 2015 - May 2018
Core Habitat Plan definitions
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Build Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Build EngineerContributions:23 commits, 5 PRs, 2 pushes in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Adam primarily contributed to improving the build and deployment processes for the Habitat plans within the repository. They focused on fixing the functional test suite, adding build targets, and restoring Dockerfile functionality to create a base image. Their work included adding dependencies, enhancing the bldr build process and adding build support for Docker container. They also implemented the bind mounting of the Docker socket for the studio.
planhabitatpackage-managerdefinitionspackages
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