About
Jacob Spradlin
Full-stack engineer. I build and ship production web applications — the whole path from schema and auth through payments, AI features, and the deployment that keeps them running.
I am a veteran, and I run Formation Labs LLC, the studio this site belongs to, founded in 2025. Since then I have shipped fifteen-plus projects: two-sided marketplaces with real money moving through them, a hiring platform where I serve as CTO, consumer tools used by veterans, and security audits of other people's codebases. Most of it is Next.js and TypeScript on Supabase and Stripe, with Claude doing work that used to require a person.
What I'm looking for
A full-time software engineering role — full-stack or product engineering — on a team that ships to real users and cares whether the thing actually works. I am most useful where the surface is wide: somebody has to own the schema, the payment flow, the background jobs, and the thing that breaks at 3am, and I would rather be that person than be handed tickets.
Open to remote or hybrid. If you are hiring and want to talk, the fastest path is contact@formationlabs.dev.
How I work
Four things I actually do, with the receipts rather than the adjectives.
Verify in production, not in the PR description
A feature is done when I have watched it work against the real system: a real Stripe transfer, a real cron invocation, a real row in the database. On one marketplace build, the escrow auto-release job had been deployed and silently redirected by middleware for 96 days. Code review would never have caught it. Probing the live endpoint did.
Put the invariant in CI
When correctness matters and humans keep getting it wrong, I write the gate. A content platform I maintain publishes state-by-state benefits guidance, where a factual regression is a real problem for the reader — so the fact check runs in prebuild and fails the production build.
Take the audit seriously
I have been on both sides of a security review: running them for clients, and receiving a 100-plus finding architect review on a platform I built. The second is more useful. Findings get a ledger, per-finding runbooks, and a re-test, not a defensive email.
Async-first, written down
Scope, decisions, and tradeoffs go in writing where the next person can find them. Most of what I know about the systems I have built lives in documentation I maintain because I needed it, not because someone asked for it.
Stack
What I reach for by default. Everything listed here is in something I have shipped.
Core
- TypeScript
- Next.js (App Router)
- React
- Tailwind CSS
- Node.js
Data & infrastructure
- PostgreSQL
- Supabase (RLS, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions)
- Prisma
- Vercel
- Redis / BullMQ
Payments & integrations
- Stripe (Connect, escrow, webhooks)
- Resend
- Twilio
- n8n
AI
- Claude API (streaming, tool use, agents)
- Retrieval and ranking pipelines
- Ollama / local models
Mobile
- React Native / Expo
- Flutter
Quality
- Playwright
- Vitest
- CI correctness gates
- Security review and remediation
Education
B.S. Applied Technology
University of Maryland Global Campus — in progress, expected 2027
See the work
Shipped products, client engagements, and write-ups of the parts that were actually hard.
Selected work