Early Career and Background
Jansen began his career in digital systems and graphics computing in New Zealand during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was associated with technology companies involved in computer-aided design, publishing systems, and digital production workflows. During this period, he worked on early web infrastructure and interactive digital systems as internet technologies began to mature.
His early work combined interface design with backend engineering, reflecting a cross-disciplinary technical approach that later characterised his systems architecture work.
Media and Publishing Systems
In the 2000s, Jansen worked on digital platforms supporting publishing and media organisations. His responsibilities included building scalable web systems, managing content pipelines, and designing data integration infrastructure. Colleagues from this period have described him as a technically versatile engineer capable of bridging architectural design and low-level performance debugging.
In 2016, Jansen assisted journalists at NPR in investigating the origins of a network of fake news websites during coverage of misinformation during the U.S. presidential election. His contribution involved tracing hosting infrastructure and domain linkages through technical forensic analysis.
Transition to Data and AI Infrastructure
Jansen later transitioned into data-centric engineering roles in Silicon Valley. His work expanded into distributed systems, search infrastructure, and machine learning pipelines.
At Primer.ai, an artificial intelligence company focused on natural language processing and enterprise intelligence, Jansen has served as a senior staff engineer. He has been associated with the design and implementation of foundational systems including:
- Directed acyclic graph (DAG) workflow orchestration frameworks
- Asynchronous computational execution models
- Distributed ingestion pipelines
- Scalable search and indexing infrastructure
These systems support large-scale document processing and AI-driven analysis workflows.
Architectural Contributions
Jansen's engineering work is characterised by an emphasis on:
- Platform-level system design
- Reusable execution frameworks
- Performance optimisation
- Structural simplification of complex systems
Peers have described him as operating across abstraction layers, combining high-level architectural reasoning with detailed systems debugging and algorithmic refinement.
His contributions have influenced daily engineering workflows within his organisations, particularly in the design of asynchronous task execution and pipeline orchestration models.
Professional Reputation
Jansen has received professional endorsements from senior engineers and technical leaders in artificial intelligence and distributed systems. He is described as a systems-oriented engineer with the ability to identify structural inefficiencies and refactor complex implementations into more durable, performant architectures.
Although not widely known for public conference speaking or academic publication, his work has been recognised within professional and investigative contexts.
Engineering Philosophy
Jansen's approach emphasises long-term system durability over short-term implementation speed. His work reflects a preference for explicit architectural patterns, deterministic execution models, and infrastructure designed for scale and maintainability.