Salim Jordan

Technical delivery leader

More than twenty years delivering enterprise systems. Now I build AI ones.

I have taken CRM, enterprise search and operational systems into production for banks, telcos and government, and led delivery teams in three countries. With AI systems, I test each one against real cases before anyone relies on it.

Up to 15
direct reports across Australia, Singapore and the Philippines
20+ years
enterprise delivery for banks, telcos, government and media
Two to three
client engagements run at once, each led start to finish

Clients have included Telstra · NAB · Commonwealth Bank · Yahoo Japan · Standards Australia · Foxtel · NSW Office of State Revenue

01 — Record

Record

Independent

Jul 2025–present

AI Engineer and Product Builder

  • Lantera Solutions: my independent practice, working with clients to evaluate their AI needs.
  • Readwider: built and runs a production SaaS for indie authors, and shipped its first LLM feature switched off when the evaluation showed a simpler baseline matched it.
  • PhotoTours: a deployed product that classifies tours for photography relevance.
  • LawGlance: merged AI evals to this open-source legal app.

Freelance

2005–Jul 2025

Technical Consultant

  • Alongside enterprise roles, technical director for a founder-led family event-planning platform: inherited it, rebuilt it twice, the second time directing an outsourced team, and saw it through its acquisition by TogetherWork in July 2025.

MarkLogic

2018–2023

Managing Principal Consultant

  • Ran a delivery team of up to 15 across Australia, Singapore and the Philippines, with two to three client engagements in flight at once, each carried from scoping to production handover.
  • During the early COVID-19 response, put operational dashboards, case analysis, report search, incident timelines and geospatial tools into production for Australian state law enforcement within weeks.
  • Ran requirements, design and delivery with Japanese clients in Japanese, as their link to global engineering teams.

MarkLogic

2015–2018

Senior Consultant

  • Led enterprise search and content-platform deployments into production for Standards Australia, Foxtel and NSW Office of State Revenue, coordinating teams in Japan, the Philippines, the UK and the US.

RightNow / Oracle

2008–2015

Senior Application Engineer, Technical Delivery Manager, Managing Technical Consultant

  • Took enterprise CRM live across APAC for Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, NAB, Commonwealth Bank, RMIT, Monash, the University of New England, Yahoo Japan and Leopalace21.
  • Selected during the integration with Oracle to lead RightNow Consulting's technical capability across Asia Pacific.
  • Spent two months on-site in Japan implementing CRM for Ricoh, one of Japan's largest companies.
  • Helped turn around a stalled GREE engagement in Japanese: two weeks on-site, and the client went to full implementation.

Earlier

US contract work for media, publication, airline and sales clients. Affinity Internet, Los Angeles: the first developer in its web department, later team lead and department co-manager, behind hosting accounts for 300 thousand customers. REA Group, Melbourne: led development of back-office applications for real estate agents, and designed, developed and implemented the port of its core CRM.

Education and credentials

University of New England

2022

Master of Information Technology

High Distinction. Vice-Chancellor Scholar.

Deakin University

2021

Graduate Certificate of Information Systems

Oracle

APAC Oracle Management Foundation Program

MarkLogic

MarkLogic Certified Developer

Languages

English (native) and Japanese (JLPT N2)

Conversational Spanish.

02 — How I work

How I work

I lead delivery from requirements to handover, and I still build, so I can judge the work I'm accountable for.

Method

  • I build the test set from real cases, and a version with no model, before I build the model.
  • I keep the parts that need no model deterministic, so the model is measured on its own.
  • I write down what the numbers say, including when they say not to ship.

Leading

  • Coordinated RightNow's partner network across Australia, New Zealand, India and Singapore.
  • When a restructure moved the Philippines team under me, no one left.
  • Took engagements through to a handover to the team that would run them.
  1. 01

    On Readwider, a deterministic baseline tied Claude Haiku on the real cases, so the model shipped switched off. The same eval caught two pipeline bugs and rejected a prompt change.

    Read the write-up
  2. 02

    In a portfolio project classifying 4,742 customer reviews, two rounds of prompt refinement each lowered accuracy. Asking for a star rating instead of a label raised it from 81.9% to 84.5%.

    Read the write-up
  3. 03

    In a portfolio retrieval pipeline over a 160-page financial report, a reranker lowered MRR by 0.070 and took latency from 1 ms to 4,198 ms, so I left it out.

    Read the write-up

03 — Work

Recent work

  • product

    Readwider

    A newsletter-swap platform for indie authors, where I'm the sole engineer: three Next.js apps, a 48-table Postgres schema, Stripe billing, and 2,190+ automated tests.

  • open-source contribution

    LawGlance

    Added retrieval-evaluation metrics (Recall@K and MRR) and grounded LawGlance's legal responses in inline supporting citations. Both contributions were merged.

  • product

    PhotoTours

    A deployed product that classifies about 2,000 tours for photography relevance, running as three services on Vercel, DigitalOcean and AWS EC2, with 108 tests.

04 — Testimonials

In their words

  • “I know him to be a dynamic technical leader, a dedicated worker with a naturally engaging personality who is capable of building rapport with all levels, from management, to partners, stakeholders and technical staff.”
    Dave Platter Colleague, REA Group
  • “Salim is now in a technical leadership position where he is using his experience, attitude, and skills to ensure a whole new team of engineers can create successful solutions as he has done for many years.”
    Ruben Martin Colleague, RightNow Technologies
  • “…his continued willingness to support and develop those of us who are less skilled is a real tribute to his personal and managerial style.”
    Don Pennell Client, then colleague, at RightNow Technologies
  • “When I have brought on other programmers for tasks, Salim has helped vet them and their work, and was always looking out for my best interest. I trust him completely.”
    Dan Moskovitz Founder and long-term client
  • “There are many great application engineers out there, but few combine technical attributes with great interpersonal and leadership skills, and unbounding positive energy and relentless drive to get the job completed.”
    Patrick Tobin Client, CRM implementation at the University of New England