Jeff Lacey

iOS Engineer & Lead — Austin, TX

15 years of Swift and Objective-C. What I'm best at is getting things built — making the architectural calls that move a product from stuck to shipped.

How I work

One of my projects was for a large, well-known dog-food brand. The iOS lead left, making me the sole developer, and the project was blocked because the hardware wasn't working — the hardware and software teams had been pointing fingers at each other for weeks. I drove over to their office, sat down with the lead hardware engineer, and we found the bug together: an uninitialized array. It took ten minutes once we were in the same room. The company eventually built an internal team to take the project over, and the product is on the market today.

That's the kind of move senior engineers make when something is stuck — you find the human who can unstick it, even if they're in a different building or a different company.

What I'm building

AnimalID

2024 — present

A production web app (PWA) with AI-powered vet record extraction (Claude Sonnet), QR-based pet identity, payments, and a full SaaS model. Solo build, end to end.

PWA was the right call for an identity layer: anyone can scan a QR code and reach a pet's profile from any device, no install required. The eventual vision is an animal identity platform other software can leverage during disasters — the unglamorous infrastructure layer that real things get built on top of.

Next.js · Supabase · Vercel · Claude Sonnet · Stripe

Ambi

2025

A native iOS app and one of the first built on Apple's Foundation Models framework. Shipped solo to the App Store. Built to understand what on-device AI-native mobile development feels like in production, not in a sandbox.

SwiftUI · Apple Foundation Models

Background

2021 — 2022 Senior / Lead iOS Engineer, Literati. Led iOS until the mobile team was laid off.
15 years Consumer & connected-device iOS. Swift and Objective-C, mostly as senior or lead engineer. Including the dog-food-brand project above.
Current iOS Lead Essentials — Essential Developer. Putting formal names to patterns I've used for fifteen years and sharpening the parts I want to keep using for the next fifteen.

What I'm looking for

A senior iOS or engineering lead role on a team where the mobile app is the product, where AI integration is real work and not a marketing line, and where 15 years of shipping judgment is treated as the asset it is. Remote.