Jonathan Barber
CTO & Cofounder at Contender
Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJonathan Barber is a pragmatic technology leader and CTO with 16 years of engineering experience and a PhD in bioinformatics, now based in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal. He has progressed from HPC and systems administration into building and leading distributed engineering teams, most recently driving product, reliability, security (HIPAA, SOC2) and AI-driven test generation at Rainforest QA before cofounding Contender. Comfortable wearing many hats, he blends hands-on infrastructure and backend expertise (GCP/AWS, Terraform, large VM clusters) with people-first leadership and measurable delivery through DORA-backed practices. He has a track record of turning research-grade knowledge into production features—instrumenting telemetry and labelling to understand production behavior—and thrives on solving problems that sit at the intersection of computers and people. Colleagues describe him as curious, generous with mentorship, and persistent in reducing toil while improving outcomes.
16 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Bioinformatics, PhD Bioinformatics at University of DundeeBSc Biotechnology, BSc Biotechnology at Imperial College London
Portuguese, English
Github Skills (101)
command-line-interface10
backend10
server-side10
http-exception10
chrome-extension10
frontend10
rest9
trigger8
clojure8
circleci-orb8
http8
queue-classic8
circleci8
slack-bot8
ci-tools8
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
rainforestapp/circlemator
Jan 2016 - Jan 2023
A bucket of tricks for automating CircleCI and Github
Contributions:2 reviews, 29 commits, 32 PRs in 7 years 1 month
circlecibackend
rainforestapp/queue_classic_matchers
Apr 2018 - Jan 2023
RSpec matchers for queue_classic
Contributions:1 review, 19 commits, 11 PRs in 4 years 9 months
rspecbackend
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