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
–
  • 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)