Jason Cusati

djjay@vt.eduGitHub: djjay0131LinkedIn: jason-cusati

Professional Summary

Computer Science PhD candidate and applied researcher who bridges large-scale software engineering with empirical AI/ML research. Two decades architecting Azure data platforms and SaaS systems now grounds research that is reproducible, deployable, and measured against real workloads, spanning LLM-assisted software engineering, security classification, and mechanistic interpretability. Published at ICSE 2026, with hands-on depth in ML pipelines, evaluation design, and the engineering rigor that industry R&D depends on.

Professional Experience

2024 -- Present

Virginia Tech — Blacksburg, VA
Doctoral Researcher --- Software Engineering with AI/ML/MI

Researching LLM-curated knowledge graphs as a provenance substrate for evidence-based research progression --- studying how agent-orchestrated curation (Navigator / Extractor / Continuation) improves faithfulness of downstream LLM responses compared to LLM-generated KGs.

2024--2025

Yoh, A Day & Zimmerman Company — Remote, SC
ADF Solution Architect -- Core Specialty Insurance

Led a small SDE team delivering V1 of an Insurance Data Ingestion Platform for a specialty carrier: extended Microsoft's Common Data Model into a domain schema for the carrier's data types; reduced time-to-ingest by 50%.

2021--2023

Duck Creek Technologies — Columbia, SC
Senior Technical Architect -- OnDemand SaaS Operations

Developed Python algorithm to predict Sev 1 incidents from logs.

2016--2020

Blackbaud — Charleston, SC
Principal Engineer -- Sustained Engineering

Delivered root-cause production fixes across enterprise products using C#, SQL, and performance tooling; achieved 100% resolution on critical cases.

Earlier employment history includes tenure as Solution Architect -- Enterprise Professional Services, Blackbaud; Software Engineering Consultant, DJJayNet Consulting.

Education

2027 (exp.)

Ph.D., Computer Science (SE with AI/ML/MI), Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

2026 (exp.)

M.S., Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

B.S., Economics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

Publications

Journal Articles

2026

Virginia Tech Transportation Safety Index (VTTSI) — Jason Cusati, Cheng-Shun Chuang. arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.21154

Link

2025

Exploring the Evidence-Based SE Beliefs of Generative AI Tools — Chris Brown, Jason Cusati. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.13900

Link

Conference Proceedings

2026

From Papers to Progress: Rethinking Knowledge Accumulation in Software Engineering — Jason Cusati, Chris Brown. Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026)

Link DOI

Technical Skills

AI/ML

scikit-learn; TensorFlow; LLM; SVM; Random Forest; Feature Engineering

Tools

Azure; AWS; Docker; PostgreSQL; SQL Server; FastAPI; Streamlit

Languages

Python; C#; Java; JavaScript; T-SQL; Bash

Miscellaneous Experience

Awards and Achievements

May 2026

Phi Kappa Phi, inducted member --- national honor society recognizing academic excellence across all disciplines.

May 2026

Omicron Delta Kappa, inducted member --- national leadership honor society.

2008

Customer Service Award, LimeLeap Professional Services.

Certification

Certified Jira & Confluence Administrator
Certified Scrum Master
Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP)