How to Actually Get Hired

Jonathan Lebensold's career moves in a specific pattern: ship something, then go understand why it breaks. He co-founded Paradem, a Montreal software consultancy that built line-of-business applications for startups and enterprises, and during that period wrote the React Native Cookbook for O'Reilly, one of the earliest comprehensive guides to cross-platform mobile development. Technical book writing at that level requires explaining a system end-to-end to someone who has never seen it with enough clarity to survive scale. He then pivoted hard into research: completing a PhD at McGill University and Mila under Borja Balle (now at Google DeepMind, one of the leading differential privacy researchers in the world) and Doina Precup (one of the most cited reinforcement learning researchers globally, co-director of Mila's Montreal office). His doctoral work focused on differential privacy, privacy-preserving machine learning, and generative model accountability: the formal discipline of proving that an ML system did what you permitted it to do, not just what you wanted it to do. He then worked as a visiting researcher at Meta AI on privacy-preserving ML and at Reliant AI on AI reasoning before founding Jetty. His Google Scholar profile has 1,331 citations. He is also a contributor to OpenMined's PySyft, implementing websocket infrastructure for distributed privacy-preserving ML, which is how he entered the research community before the formal PhD. His Substack, Ground Truth, is the most substantive window into his thinking: the post "Generation Got Cheap. Verification Didn't." is a 2,500-word rigorous case, citing an MIT paper on the Measurability Gap, that constructs the intellectual argument for why Jetty exists. He appeared on Nick Taylor's Streams to discuss agent hill-climbing and evaluation. His X bio reads: "AI has an evaluation problem and I'm trying to fix it." That is the product thesis in nine words. He books his own demos via Calendly. His family maintains a shared website at lebensold.ca where his personal page sits alongside those of Esther, Julian, and Suzanne. An early consultancy bio notes he enjoys baking apple pie. His academic supervisors are two of the most rigorous researchers Mila has produced. Both details are real and neither is a contradiction.

Ezra Hopkins is the UX and design co-founder at Jetty, and his path to that role runs through an unusually broad set of contexts. Earlier in his career he was a project lead at the Baha'i organization, contributing to initiatives around global unity, the harmony of science and religion, and international cooperation. That is not a common background for a software product designer, and it is not irrelevant: working in a governance-oriented, values-driven international organization builds intuition about how people make decisions under uncertainty and how information needs to be communicated to people who are not technical specialists. He then moved into design and web development professionally, working at TimeZoneOne, an international creative communications agency, designing web interfaces and applications using a ColdFusion-based CMS, and at Terabyte Interactive, building web pages with a .NET-based CMS while managing client relationships and subcontractor coordination. His design work is grounded in enterprise software interfaces: complex, information-dense, built for operators who need clarity under pressure, not for consumers who need delight. He joined Jonathan at Paradem as UX Lead, where the same brief applied: line-of-business applications that had to work reliably for people who could not afford to misread an interface. At Jetty, that problem is sharpened. The trace viewer, the escalation notice, the runbook editor, these are products that non-technical hospital administrators or financial operations leads will use to determine whether to trust an agent's output. If those surfaces are confusing, the verification problem does not get solved. Ezra is the co-founder responsible for making sure they are not confusing. His public profile is concentrated on LinkedIn and design portfolio work rather than social media or writing.