Jared Leonard
I build edge-computing platforms at browser scale.
Senior Frontend Engineer (SDE III) at AWS. Distributed systems, platform engineering, and the interesting part of the frontend — which is most of it. Arlington, Virginia.
An eight-part series reframing browser work as distributed systems work. Single-threaded runtimes, engine internals, the patterns that break at the edge, architecture that survives the network.
What I work on
A client-side distributed orchestration system that gives AWS customers a unified view of their infrastructure across every commercial region. AWS has no global API. I built one at the browser edge: ~1,000 concurrent API calls fanned across 30+ regions, full global inventory in under 5 seconds. Adaptive throttling, IndexedDB persistence, progressive rendering. Sole owner for 5 years — architecture, implementation, operations, on-call.
The primary management interface for AWS's core networking stack — subnets, route tables, gateways, security groups, NACLs. Both the product for customers and the microfrontend platform other teams build their consoles on.
A little context
I grew up in Humansdorp, a small town on the Eastern Cape of South Africa. I studied computer science at Nelson Mandela University, started my career in Cape Town, and eventually ended up in Arlington, Virginia — building the tools that AWS customers use to manage their cloud infrastructure.
The distance between those two places, and the fact that the same craft works in both, is most of what I find interesting about software.
Stack
TypeScript, React, Node.js. AWS (EC2, VPC, Lambda, S3, SNS, SQS, CloudWatch, IndexedDB). Microfrontend architecture, client-side API orchestration, performance engineering, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code. React Native and serverless backends earlier in my career.