Kurt Jacobson
Staff Engineer at Spotify
Greater Boston United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKurt Jacobson is a Staff Engineer with 18 years of experience blending software engineering, research, and music informatics to build music discovery and recommendation systems. Based in Greater Boston and currently at Spotify since 2010, he combines deep signal processing and ML expertise with strong software architecture skills in Java, Python, and Scala. His PhD work and roles at Queen Mary and the Centre for Digital Music reflect a long-standing focus on computational musicology, DSP, and linked-data services for music metadata. Kurt has practical experience bringing semantic web technologies into production—evident from notable contributions to the MusicBrainz server adding RDFa support and integrating semantic tooling. He’s equally comfortable in R&D and production contexts, from designing audio codecs and psychoacoustic experiments to shipping large-scale backend systems. That mix of academic rigor and hands-on engineering makes him adept at turning complex music science into scalable, production-grade features.
18 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
B.S, Electrical Engineering, B.S, Electrical Engineering at University of MiamiPh.D, Electrical Engineering, Ph.D, Electrical Engineering at Queen Mary University of London, 2010
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (8)
semantic-web10
rdfa10
perl10
template-toolkit10
testing9
javascript8
catalyst8
react7
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
metabrainz/musicbrainz-server
Aug 2010 - May 2011
Server for the MusicBrainz project (website, API, database tools)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:46 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Kurt's primary contributions revolve around implementing and integrating RDFa (Resource Description Framework in Attributes) for the MusicBrainz server. They added new features and modified existing code to incorporate RDFa, including creating new files with template macros and modifying existing filters and code to support the new functionality. These changes involved adding new tests and integrating external libraries to enable semantic web support to the MusicBrainz project. They have also been involved in merging code from the master branch to their branch, resolving conflicts, and incorporating the latest changes.
apireactmysqlmusicbrainzdatabase-api
kurtjx/n3-mode-for-emacs
Oct 2010 - Dec 2017
a major mode for emacs for editing n3 and turtle RDF
Contributions:6 commits, 5 PRs, 3 pushes in 7 years 3 months
turtle-rdfemacsturtlemajor-moderdf
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