Jimmy Callin

Stockholm, Sweden

Staff engineer energized by difficult challenges, collaborative teams, and building systems that hold up well for both users and the people maintaining them.

At Backlight, I serve as technical and operational lead for the Academy Award-winning ftrack Studio product — a collaboration platform for global film and TV production.

My background spans product development, developer tooling, and cross-functional technical leadership. I have roots in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, developed at Uppsala University and applied at Apple.

The less familiar the problem, the more there is to explore — and I'm most at home in teams where collaboration, good energy, and forward momentum go hand in hand.

Experience

Backlight

Stockholm, Sweden
Staff Software Engineer
– Present
Senior Full-Stack Developer & Acting Team Lead
–
  • Drove the team's adoption of agentic AI coding workflows, already speeding up development, improving code quality, and helping diagnose support and regression issues faster. Automated large parts of PR review, cutting review times while meeting SOC 2 requirements. The north star is for non-technical colleagues to prototype product ideas with minimal engineering involvement.
  • Led a team of 6+ frontend and backend developers as Acting Team Lead from December 2022, directly managing 2 frontend engineers and mentoring across the broader team, while owning technical direction across the Studio product; formally promoted to Staff Software Engineer in January 2025.
  • Authored design documents and led cross-functional planning sessions spanning product, engineering, customer support, and direct customer input — aligning technical priorities with business needs and ensuring solutions addressed real operational pain points.
  • Designed the modern frontend infrastructure (TypeScript, React, Vite) and an interoperability layer enabling incremental adoption alongside the legacy Ext.js codebase, establishing a clear migration strategy that avoided a costly full rewrite.
  • Architected an org-wide Docker-based development environment that cut initial engineering onboarding setup from weeks to hours.
  • Introduced CI/CD pipelines and per-PR preview environments across all pull requests, tightening feedback loops and enabling non-technical stakeholders to verify fixes directly — significantly reducing QA cycles and cross-team communication overhead.
  • Drove the shift from infrequent big-bang releases to a continuous delivery model — shipping features as they are completed rather than batching them — reducing deployment risk through smaller changesets and eliminating the coordination overhead of large synchronized releases.

Technologies: TypeScript, Python, Docker, React, TanStack Query, GitHub Actions, Vite, MariaDB

Bonnier News

Stockholm, Sweden
Software Developer & Lead Developer
–
  • Built editorial tooling that streamlined journalist workflows and drove backend modernization for one of Sweden's most-visited news sites.
  • Led backend development on a multi-year CMS monolith decomposition, rebuilding core publishing infrastructure as a modern microservice architecture.
  • As Lead Developer from 2020, defined and drove a cross-team backend architecture initiative that significantly reduced technical debt across the organization.

Technologies: TDD, Node.js, React, Python, Machine Learning, Elasticsearch, Redis, Kubernetes (Openshift), PostgreSQL

Apple

Cupertino, California
Siri Language Engineer
–
–
  • Language engineering contractor on Apple Siri's Swedish localization team, based in Cupertino and Paris; improved Swedish language understanding and user experience across two separate engagements.

Technologies: Python, Machine Learning

Gavagai

Stockholm, Sweden
Support Manager & Editor
–
  • Built and owned the technical customer support process for an AI text analytics startup, ensuring inquiries were handled efficiently and transparently.
  • Developed internal data analysis tooling and NLP pipelines, including sentiment analysis, supporting the customer insights platform.

Technologies: Python, Java, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing

Publications

Part-of-Speech Driven Cross-Lingual Pronoun Prediction with Feed-Forward Neural Networks.

Association for Computational Linguistics

For some language pairs, pronoun translation is a discourse-driven task which requires information that lies beyond its local context. For cross-lingual pronoun prediction, we suggest a neural network-based model using preceding nouns and determiners as features for suggesting antecedent candidates. Our model scores on par with similar models while having a simpler architecture.

Education

Uppsala University

Uppsala, Sweden
Master's and Bachelor's degree in Language Technology
–

Applying linguistics and computer science for computational modeling of natural language. Elective courses were mainly focused on mathematics and statistics. Master's had a greater focus on research projects.

Skills

Languages
TypeScript (primary), Python, Node.js
Frontend
React, TanStack Query, Vite
Infrastructure
Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Elasticsearch, Redis
Practices
TDD, CI/CD, system design
AI / ML
Machine learning, NLP, LLM agent workflows
Spoken languages
Swedish (native), English (full professional proficiency)