Jon Laing Portrait

Jon Laing

Product Engineer & Designer

Brooklyn, NY·github.com/jonlaing·linkedin.com/in/jonlaing

Summary

Full-stack product engineer with a designer's eye. I came up through a BFA and design work before spending the last decade-plus shipping products in React, React Native, and TypeScript. These days I'm Lead Product Engineer at Farsight AI, where I built the web-app frontend from scratch, set the frontend direction for our Platform Engineering team, and tame the messy state that comes back from LLMs. Before that I built data-visualization tools at Scholastic, led desktop software at MakerBot, and founded a couple of startups of my own. I care about the whole thing — the interface people actually touch, accessibility by default, and architecture that won't fight you a year from now.

Experience

Lead Product Engineer

Farsight AI

Aug 2025 — Present

  • Built Farsight's entire web-app frontend from the ground up and set the frontend technical direction across the Platform Engineering team.
  • Created a themeable component library that unifies the UI across every product — the web app and a PowerPoint / Excel / Word add-in.
  • Designed an LLM-chatbot state-management library on nested finite-state machines to tame the complex state from our LLM service: cut thousands of lines of duplicated code, drove bugs to near zero, and sped up new features — with close to 100% test coverage.
  • Rebuilt authentication from the ground up, migrating off a brittle Cognito setup to WorkOS — now serving 1,000+ users reliably for over a year.
  • Established the frontend architecture and developer experience: monorepo, design system, testing, and build tooling.
  • Mentor engineers across Platform Engineering, and own frontend code review and hiring.

React · TypeScript · Effect.ts · XState · Base UI · Tailwind CSS

Senior Full-Stack Engineer

Scholastic

Oct 2022 — Jul 2025

  • Built data-visualization tools that surface student progress and learning insights for educators.
  • Designed interactive filtering and grouping that made large educational datasets easy to explore.
  • Worked in a cross-functional team of 12, taking features from concept to production.
  • Applied advanced state management to handle large-scale datasets without sacrificing responsiveness.
  • Championed accessibility, keeping the product WCAG-compliant and inclusive by default.
  • Mentored junior developers and helped raise the team's engineering bar.

React · TypeScript · TailwindCSS · Radix · Data viz · Accessibility · Agile

Freelance Full-Stack Engineer

Independent

Jan 2018 — Oct 2021

  • Built custom, reusable JavaScript UI components for Huge / Google.
  • Developed front-end templates on Google's Material Design system for consistency and accessibility.
  • Created a full point-of-sale application for XY Retail in React Native and TypeScript.
  • Integrated backend APIs and payment gateways for reliable transactions and data sync.

React Native · XState · TypeScript · Python

Lead, Desktop Software

MakerBot

Sep 2016 — Jan 2018

  • Led a team of four building desktop software for 3D-printer integration in Electron, React, and Flux.
  • Owned team leadership: mentoring, code review, hiring, and cross-functional communication.
  • Designed a custom print-settings interface supporting both experimental and legacy nozzles.
  • Kept the software adaptable to evolving hardware while preserving backward compatibility.

Electron · React · Flux

Senior Software Engineer & Creative Director

Brainscape

Aug 2012 — Oct 2015

  • Optimized the flashcard-syncing API, doubling its speed and eliminating long-standing bugs.
  • Led a full redesign of the corporate identity across the mobile app and website.
  • Ran user focus groups to refine interface designs.
  • Rebuilt the UI in ReactJS, migrating off jQuery.

ReactJS · jQuery

Education

B.F.A.

University of the Arts

Design and illustration from first principles — the foundation in typography, composition, and craft that still shapes how I build interfaces.

Sep 2007 — Jun 2011

Skills

Languages

TypeScriptJavaScriptRustJavaRubyHaskellReasonML / ReScriptBash

Frontend

React / React NativeNext.jsHTML5 / CSS3

Backend & AI

Node.jsEffect.tsRuby on RailsVercel AI SDKOpenAIAnthropic ClaudeLinux / Unix

Design & tooling

Adobe Creative SuiteGit

Projects

Effex

Creator & maintainer

A reactive UI framework built on Effect.ts, with first-class SSR, static generation, and type-safe routing. Powers this site.

Doulevo

Creator

An AI resume editor that analyzes, optimizes, and tailors resumes to a target role — automated content suggestions, formatting fixes, and keyword optimization to help people actually land interviews. (This very resume was built with it.)

Mutty

Founder · 2021–22

A mobile app for pet owners, built solo in React Native, Expo, and Firebase — with location-based geospatial features and privacy protocols to protect user and pet data. Shipped to iOS; never quite found its market.

Partisan.IO

Founder · 2015–16

A social network that matched people by political compatibility, powered by a proprietary alignment algorithm that scored your leanings from a 20-question assessment. Built in Go and an early version of React Native; launched a public beta.