Talk to Jarren.

Jarren San Jose builds complete web products and grows audiences. His work spans AI prototyping at Reforge, creator monetization at WannaText, and interactive media at Shibuya.

Jarren’s work

Reforge Build

Frontend ownership

Jarren led frontend development for Reforge Build from the initial team through launch. The AI prototyping product brings together design-system capture, variants, and collaboration. He was the first engineer hired outside of the VP of Engineering.

Career history Official product launch

WannaText

Product, infra, and the hard calls

Jarren builds and manages WannaText as its sole engineer. The platform connects creators with fans through messaging, paid content, and subscriptions, bringing frontend, backend, and monetization into one product.

When third-party iMessage vendors couldn’t deliver reliably, Jarren went past frontend and product work and built WannaText’s own iMessage infrastructure on a fleet of Mac minis. Shipping a great experience meant owning the whole path, so he did.

Live product

Open source work

Merged PRs in production apps

Jarren has contributed to open source projects including DefiLlama, where his merged PRs to the Next.js app cover table sorting, filter handling, mobile navigation, and accessibility fixes. He has made over 17,000 contributions on GitHub in the past year.

Merged Web Interface Guidelines PR

White Rabbit

Interactive film experience

Jarren is credited as a developer on White Rabbit, a 2025 Webby nominee for Best Community Engagement. The Shibuya project also won a 2025 Emmy for innovation in emerging media programming.

Webby credits Emmy record

DiagnosisAI

Founding engineer

Jarren was the founding engineer at DiagnosisAI, a medical AI startup backed by IBM, NVIDIA, and the Boomtown Accelerator. He built a revenue-generating Alexa skill with 100k monthly users, and the data it produced helped improve DiagnosisAI’s core AI. During COVID he built ineedanote to help people get free physician notes, and it completed 1,000+ evaluations.

Wall Street Journal front page ineedanote

Jarren builds audiences

He launched a web app for the Solana Mobile community, runs The Sushi Geek, and helps grow Chubbicorns.

Web app for Solana Phone: 100k+ visits; In the app’s first month, and even more Twitter impressions.
The Sushi Geek: 1.87M impressions / month; Monthly web impressions for his blog.
Chubbicorns: 11B+ GIPHY impressions; Growth work for the brand’s online presence.

Jarren has skin in the game

Jarren actively participates in the markets, where tastes and trends get tested with real money. He is Chubbicorns’ go-to person for all things engineering, and for growth, including their growth on GIPHY and Twitter.

Amazon Lab126: Ex-FAANG; Worked as a software engineer on Amazon’s consumer devices.
OpenSea: Top 200 by volume; One of his wallets was top 200 in OpenSea lifetime trading volume.
FOMO clans: #1 clan; Chubbicorns was the top clan in the inaugural week of clans on the trading app FOMO.

Meet Jarren.

Schedule 30 minutes for a walkthrough of the products, engineering decisions, and audience-building work that make him a fit for your team.

Connect on LinkedIn

Or write directly: sanjose.jarren@gmail.com

Product ownership: his frontend leadership at Reforge Build and sole-engineer execution at WannaText.
Product craft: at WannaText he writes the code and makes the user experience calls himself with data from creators and experimentation, shipping a steady stream of intentional, deliberate improvements to the creator and fan experience.
Whatever it takes: when iMessage vendors fell short, he moved from frontend and product into infrastructure and built the iMessage APIs himself so WannaText wouldn’t suffer from a poor experience.