Jon Carstens
Director Of Engineering at SmartRent
United States
Summary
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RockstarJon Carstens is a Director of Engineering with 11 years of experience leading teams and driving delivery across embedded, backend, and automation domains. Currently at SmartRent, he progressed from senior engineer to manager and now directs engineering efforts, combining hands-on development with people leadership. He contributes to major open-source projects like Erlang/OTP—improving SSH/TLS security and key support—and has shipped tooling to compile Elixir apps into single executables and hardened the Nerves embedded tooling. Comfortable across systems from firmware and IoT build pipelines to backend services, he focuses on reliable, secure build and deployment workflows. Jon’s background includes QA and technical support roles at Apple and MX, giving him a pragmatic focus on observability, automation, and operational robustness. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic fixes that bridge low-level protocol nuances and production engineering needs.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (24)
embedded-software10
ssl10
tls1210
erlang10
elixir-mix10
elixir10
firmware10
tasks10
tls1310
mtls10
automation10
sys10
build-automation10
libtls10
embedded10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
bake-bake-bake/bakeware
Sep 2020 - Feb 2022
Compile Elixir applications into single, easily distributed executable binaries
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & Automation Engineer
Backend Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:4 releases, 45 reviews, 73 commits in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Jon primarily focused on building and automating the build process for Elixir applications. They implemented a `create_executable` mix task to compile Elixir applications into single, self-contained binaries. Furthermore, they added support for assembly during the mix release process and refined the build process to optimize the final executable. The user also integrated compression using zstd.
elixirerlangspawnfest-2020
nerves-project/nerves
Nov 2018 - Sep 2022
Craft and deploy bulletproof embedded software in Elixir
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:11 releases, 136 reviews, 40 commits in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Jon primarily focused on improving the Nerves project's build and deployment process for embedded software. Their contributions included updating documentation for artifact retrieval, handling local system compilation, refactoring the artifact-related tasks, and adding features to the firmware unpacking tool. Furthermore, they enhanced security by verifying artifact downloads, and made adjustments to the build process by unsetting interfering environment variables and correctly handling root filesystem overlays. The user's work demonstrates a deep understanding of the Nerves ecosystem and its tooling.
elixirembeddedembedded-softwarenerves
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