Jack Ussher-smith
Senior Engineering Manager at BuzzFeed
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJack Ussher-smith is a Senior Engineering Manager based in London with seven years of progressive experience at BuzzFeed, rising from IT Specialist to senior leadership while owning reliability and platform engineering. He blends hands-on backend development—contributing to open-source SSO integrations like the Okta provider for buzzfeed/sso—with a strong operational background in site reliability and systems engineering. Jack is skilled at translating complex authentication and infrastructure requirements into maintainable code and processes, and has experience managing Go dependencies and introducing tests and refactors. Known for promoting reliability-first culture, he pairs technical depth with people leadership to scale teams and systems. An understated strength is his continuity at a single fast-moving company, giving him deep institutional knowledge and an ability to drive long-term improvements across the stack.
7 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Darrick Wood Secondary School
Github Skills (11)
okta10
authentication10
user-authentication10
go10
api10
apidoc10
oauth10
security10
ss9
testing9
go-modules8
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (1)
buzzfeed/sso
Mar 2019 - Jan 2022
sso, aka S.S.Octopus, aka octoboi, is a single sign-on solution for securing internal services
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 14 reviews, 194 commits in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Jack primarily contributed to the development of the Okta SSO provider for the `sso` repository. Their work involved implementing core features such as validating session state, handling user profile information, and managing token revocation. The user also refactored code, separated validateToken functions, and implemented initial testing for the Okta provider. Furthermore, they made updates to the `go.mod` file, demonstrating an understanding of Go dependency management.
internalsignaessingle-sign-onsecurity
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