james t. platt — jt

JT Platt

From Wall Street finance and Silicon Valley startups to classrooms in East Oakland, the sneaker industry, and state IT in Sacramento.

Five different worlds, same move: learn how the room works, then build the thing it's missing.

On the corner of Platt Street in NYC's financial district 01 JT

Wall Street

Finance · 2003–2010

I kept the books for trading desks at Bear Stearns and GFI. Got a front-row seat to the financial crisis from the brokerage side.

In a San Francisco alley with my bike, startup years 02 JT

Silicon Valley

Web Dev · 2013–2016

Three startups that were quietly the same team chasing one product through two pivots and an acquisition. I built front ends, including a Budweiser Super Bowl microsite that reached 40 million people.

Teaching a geometry lesson in an East Oakland classroom 03 JT

East Oakland

Teaching · 2017–2020

Taught geometry and computer science to teenagers in East Oakland, and earned a CTE credential doing it. Hardest job on this page, and it isn't close.

At my Sneaker Savant table at a sneaker convention 04 JT

Sneakers

Streetwear · 2013–present

I built The Sneaker Savant, a sneaker grading and consultancy practice. Grew a 17,000-person community, analyzed over 100,000 pairs, and figured out how to benchmark my hobby.

California State Capitol dome, Sacramento 05 JT

California

State IT · 2023–present

Now I'm in state IT in Sacramento, working up the classification ladder and automating the parts of government nobody enjoys. The other four panels are things I did; this one I'm still in.

selected work · closer up

The agent's daily report: scanned and surfaced counts, scored postings, and a per-posting scoring breakdown. Posting details blurred.
A daily run. Posting details redacted; the scoring breakdown is real.

jobs.jtplatt.com

A personal distributed system that runs my job search. A daily launchd cron on my Mac crawls four public-sector job boards, scores each posting against a structured inventory of my experience in two tiers (a cheap deterministic filter, then an LLM pass on the survivors), and publishes a static report the server serves behind auth. Rate-limited, robots-aware, and built so an empty scrape never overwrites the last good run.

Solo build · Python, Flask, SQLite, BeautifulSoup, Claude API · 2026

The Sneaker Savant

Built The Sneaker Savant, a sneaker grading and consultancy practice, from nothing. Grew a 17,000-person community, analyzed over 100,000 pairs, and released several sneaker trading-card sets.

Founder · brand, product, methodology · 2013–present

Budweiser "Heroes" microsite

A community-engagement microsite for Budweiser's "Heroes" Salute at Super Bowl XLVIII, built with Folds of Honor and reaching more than 40 million people. It ran the campaign's voting and user-generated content: visitors nominated their own veterans and voted on the National Guard homecoming parade at its center. Real product behind the ad, not a static page. Built at Thismoment, whose curated content streams predated the timeline interface Facebook later made standard.

Front-end engineer · voting + UGC, HTML/CSS/JS on a proprietary CMS · Super Bowl XLVIII, 2014

CodeKings → RewardStyle

Early product development at an ad-tech startup. Managed ad-server systems for hundreds of clients and ran delivery as the team scaled from 4 to 20+ people, through its acquisition by RewardStyle.

Project manager & front-end developer · ad-server systems · 2015–2016

Computer Science & CTE

Taught Geometry and Computer Science in East Oakland, built a Geometry curriculum to California standards from scratch, and earned a California Career Technical Education credential.

Teacher · curriculum design, classroom delivery · 2017–2020

the full record

technology & it

  • Information Technology Specialist I / State of California (FI$CAL) 2023–now
  • Front-End Developer / Thismoment → CodeKings → RewardStyle 2013–2016
  • IT & Accounting Consultant / Tahoe Restaurant Collection 2011–2013

finance & analysis

  • Quality Assurance Analyst / Intuit 2010–2011
  • Business Analyst, Middle Office / GFI Group 2008–2010
  • Senior Accountant & Financial Analyst / GFI Group 2006–2008
  • Commodities AR Analyst / Bear Stearns 2006
  • Junior Accountant / GFI Group 2004–2006
  • Foreign Bureau Accountant / Associated Press 2003–2004

teaching & cte

  • Mathematics & Computer Science Teacher / ARISE High School 2018–2020
  • Teacher & Web Development Instructor / Oakland Charter Academy (Amethod) 2017–2018

education & credentials

  • BA, Business Management Economics · UC Santa Cruz
  • CA Career Technical Education Credential · Business & Information Systems
  • Web Developer Certificate · Coding Dojo