Jesse Mortenson
Senior Director, Data Engineering (Plural Acquired By SAI360)
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJesse Mortenson is a seasoned data and engineering leader with over a decade of experience building cloud-native platforms, observability, and data infrastructure, currently serving as Senior Director of Data Engineering at SAI360 after Plural’s acquisition. He has held technical and executive roles—CTO, Chief Data Officer, and Infrastructure Lead—where he blended hands-on engineering with strategic product delivery and team scaling. Comfortable diving into code, Jesse contributes to open-source projects like the widely used OpenStates scrapers, fixing brittle edge cases and improving data reliability across many state scrapers. His background ranges from founding a boutique web agency to teaching full‑stack bootcamps, reflecting an unusual mix of entrepreneurship, mentorship, and practical sysadmin/devops chops. Based in Minneapolis, he publishes technical writing and side projects on jessemortenson.com and runs a consumer-facing project at swhenever.com, demonstrating both technical depth and product curiosity.
10 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Sociology, Bachelor's degree Sociology at Macalester College
Github Skills (8)
data-extraction10
scraper10
debug10
sqlalchemy10
python10
lxml9
g9
e-government9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
openstates/openstates-scrapers
Jan 2019 - Nov 2022
source for Open States scrapers
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:54 reviews, 72 commits, 394 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Jesse primarily contributed to fixing bugs and improving the functionality of the scrapers in the repository. Their work involved resolving SQLAlchemy errors, handling edge cases such as unknown parties or empty data, and improving code style. The user modified scrapers for various states, including California, Alabama, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Arkansas, Ohio, Minnesota, Vermont, and Nevada, to address issues and enhance data extraction. This indicates a focus on maintaining and improving the core data scraping logic.
scraperpythongovernmentscrapers
openstates/scrapy-test
Nov 2023 - Mar 2025
Proof of concept to test scrapy-based scrapers
Contributions:9 reviews, 10 PRs, 16 pushes in 1 year 4 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.