Kellen Jackson

Chief Technology Officer at escalated.io

Indianapolis, Indiana, United States

About Kellen Jackson

Kellen Jackson is Chief Technology Officer at escalated.io. Location: Indianapolis, Indiana, United States.

I’m a backend and cloud engineer with nearly 18 years of experience building real-time ad serving and ad fraud detection systems. Most of my career has been spent as the sole or lead developer in small startups, where I was responsible for both the architecture and the day-to-day realities of keeping production systems up and running. I work primarily with backend languages (Perl, Python, Node.js), relational databases (MySQL), caching and counters (Redis/Valkey), and AWS infrastructure. I’ve designed and operated ad serving platforms, reporting and analytics tools, and fraud/anomaly detection pipelines that process high-volume traffic and needed to be both fast and reliable. In a technology leadership capacity (Director of Software Development and CTO), I led the transition from a single-region, manually managed environment to a cloud-native architecture on AWS (EC2 Auto Scaling, ELB, Route 53, S3, CloudFront, Lambda, SNS, ElastiCache, EFS) and introduced CI/CD and automated deployments. I also designed advanced anomaly detection systems, including burst and frequency analysis using probabilistic data structures (e.g., Count-Min Sketch) and EWMA-based latency outlier detection. Alongside ongoing leadership and system oversight, I take on select consulting engagements focused on stabilizing and evolving backend systems, improving cloud infrastructure, and enhancing analytics and reporting pipelines in production environments. I’m especially interested in problems where real-time data, system design, and statistical or AI-driven methods align, and I’m increasingly incorporating modern AI tooling (including large language models) into analytics and anomaly detection workflows. Open to remote consulting opportunities where I can help design, troubleshoot, and scale backend systems, cloud infrastructure, and data-driven platforms in a practical, production-focused way.

Skills

  • Database Administration
  • React.js
  • Cloud Computing

Additional experience

  • Independent Backend & Cloud Consultant

    Self Employed

    Started February 2026

Education

  • BA, Swarthmore College