Executive judgment,
built through delivery.

Architecture, people, and the business behind the system.

Jay’s work spans healthcare, threat intelligence, consumer platforms, and startups. Over that time his role moved from platform engineering to technology leadership, with direct responsibility for hiring, vendor decisions, budgets, quality assurance, and releases.

From 2010 to 2021 he was founder and CIO of WEBApps.NYC, where software delivery came with the rest of running a business: building teams, managing partnerships and client contracts, and planning operating and capital budgets. That experience shapes how he advises clients now.

At Vitasphere he brings those threads together around the decision in front of you: what to build, what to change, who should own it, and how you will know the work is ready.

LifeChef: platform leadership and applied AI.

Role: CTO and Principal, since 2020.

Jay leads technology for LifeChef’s personalized nutrition platform, a subscription service that matches meals to each member’s health profile.

The clearest example of his current approach is the company’s intelligence platform. A team of four delivered it in six weeks, built to align with HIPAA requirements. Every piece of work started from a written specification. AI handled repetitive implementation and structural verification, and the engineers owned requirements, design decisions, and final sign-off.

The AI took the routine volume off the team, and the specifications gave the engineers a fixed standard to check that work against. That combination is how a small team moved quickly in a regulated setting without cutting corners. It also meant introducing new tools into a working business with existing members, workflows, and delivery commitments.

Jay’s original post about the project · Healthcare technology advisory

Flashpoint: from platform architecture to technology direction.

Roles: Lead Platform Architect, Director of Technology, and VP of Technology, 2013–2015.

Flashpoint provides threat intelligence to enterprises and government agencies. Jay joined to build the platform and moved on to lead the company’s technology strategy and execution.

Holding both jobs at one company gave him two views a senior advisor needs: how the architecture works in detail, and what it takes to set direction for a technology organization.

Roles and background on LinkedIn · Fractional CTO services

FoodieTrip: simplify the system so the team can move.

Role: Software Engineering Advisor, 2017–2018.

Jay led a three-developer team on a marketplace for local food experiences. The product had been through several earlier development teams, and the work focused on making it stable, cheaper to host, and easier to change.

The team standardized and modernized the stack and automated recurring procedures. It is a small, practical example of an assessment turning directly into engineering changes.

The FoodieTrip role on LinkedIn · Technology assessment

Keep the judgment. Expand what the tools can do.

Jay’s current engineering work covers AI agents, semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, and model evaluation. The questions stay concrete: what information the system can see, what it is allowed to do, how its results are checked, and who is accountable for the outcome.

WebFetch.MCP

Jay wrote an open-source MCP server that gives local AI clients web search and content extraction. The code is public, so anyone can see how he builds the tools that bring outside information into an AI workflow.

WebFetch.MCP on GitHub

Enso

Enso is the working discipline behind this practice: describe the outcome, decide how it will be evaluated, and keep a person clearly in charge as automation takes on more of the work.

Read the methodology · AI strategy and readiness

Award-winning campaign platforms.

At KBS+ (Spies & Assassins), Jay engineered the platforms behind campaigns for BMW, Armani Exchange, and Vera Wang. Industry recognition for that work includes:

• ADC Gold Cube, 2012. Art Directors Club, for BMW ActiveE.
• IAB MIXX Gold, 2012. For the BMW Electronauts iPad app.
• London International Awards Silver, 2011. For BMW ActiveE.
• EPA Green Power Leadership, 2013. Campaign award for the BMW ActiveE launch.

Selected experience, in context.

The examples above describe roles Jay held at each organization; they are not Vitasphere client engagements. His LinkedIn profile has the full history, including Front Row Labs, and his personal site offers another introduction.