Work

Here's a selection of cool things I've worked on.

Rye Head of Engineering

Rye is an a16z-backed devtools startup that's building a universal API for eCommerce.

Developer Tooling
eCommerce
Firestore
GCP
gRPC
GraphQL
MongoDB

Rye head-hunted me (through this site!) at the beginning of 2024 as a Staff Engineer. A few months later we had scaled the team, and I was promoted to Head of Engineering to drive execution and lead the engineering team.

Rye makes eCommerce APIs to sell anything on the internet, sync product data and programmatically place orders. An integration with Rye enables businesses to instantly sell a billion different product SKUs.

Crimson Education Engineering Manager (AI)

Crimson Education is a global EdTech company that helps students get into the world’s best universities.

AI
AWS
EdTech
LLMs
pgvector
Snowflake
spaCy
Tensorflow

At the beginning of 2023 I moved out of Crimson Global Academy to build and manage new AI team inside the parent organization. My team was responsible for a number of high impact features which cut cost and improved quality throughout Crimson's entire consulting business. I worked closely with our CPO to define the team's roadmap and priorities.

Our releases form the backbone of Crimson's AI strategy, and are a key part of the upcoming Flamingo App SaaS offering's value proposition.

After leaving I continued to work in a fractional capacity, to provide ongoing advice and guidance to the team.

AdmitYogi Essays Lead Engineer

AdmitYogi Essays is an AI-powered essay review service which improves equity in the college admissions process by democratizing access to essay review.

AI
EdTech
LLMs
Next.js
SaaS
Stripe
Vercel

I was brought on to this project to build out the initial MVP and prove the product concept. Managing one other engineer and working closely with our product manager, we released a beta build after a couple months of development.

AdmitYogi Essays leverages a multi-faceted AI pipeline to produce essay reviews that are near identical to human reviews. College admissions essays vary across many different dimensions, making it impossible to apply a "one size fits all" model.

Crimson Global Academy Engineering Team Lead

Crimson Global Academy is the world's first fully online global high school, and offers a differentiated education experience through its in-house technology platform.

AWS
DevOps
EdTech
Kubernetes
People Management
PostgreSQL
React.js

I managed Crimson Global Academy's software engineering team, and owned the wider organization's DevOps platform and internal tooling. In my first couple of months on the job I slashed cloud spend by 34%, and achieved a massive 87% speedup to our CI/CD pipelines.

My team rolled out a brand new web portal for parents, an online platform for collecting student and teacher feedback, an asynchronous video review system, and a student achievements system called 'CGA Badges.' I also provided technical advice to our Revision Village team during their initial build, and helped perform technical due diligence on a number of M&As.

Deltaschool AI Faculty

Deltaschool offers an "AI Fellowship" program for audacious high school students. The AI Fellowship teaches a range of machine learning topics over an intensive 4-week program.

AI
Deep Learning
Education
Pytorch
Tensorflow

I'm AI Faculty at Deltaschool, and gave advice on the program's structure during its formative months. Since Deltaschool got off the ground, I've continued to participate by teaching workshops such as "Advanced Generative AI: Intro to GANs."

Papyrus Founder

Papyrus transforms stale math lessons into rich, digital experiences. EdTech has failed to fully realize the concept of the 'digital classroom', and Papyrus aims to change that by providing powerful technology that comfortably fits around teachers' existing pedagogical methods.

AWS
React.js
spaCy NLP
Data Visualization
Computer Algebra
SaaS

I started Papyrus as a side project during COVID lockdown, in order to investigate ways to make mathematics more engaging. Math is an incredibly useful subject, and mastery of it can have substantial impacts on a person's long-term success. Unfortunately, however, most students dislike the subject—despite educators' best efforts.

Despite US$227B* of EdTech spend, current approaches to digital learning have failed to generate any significant boost to learner achievement. Papyrus seeks to change that by turning dreary math lessons into vibrant, explorative playgrounds which entice students into a growth mindset.

Kwotimation™ Director of Engineering

The average tiler spends 10 hours a week quoting jobs and only manages to convert 33% of them. Kwotimation offers an automated quoting solution for them, saving them time, effort, and money while also bringing them online — unleashing new channels for growing their business.

AWS
React.js
Project Management
TDD
Analytics
People Management
SaaS

I helped Kwotimation escape development hell. Kwotimation had previously worked with two other development teams that had failed to deliver a working product for them.

Over the next couple of months, I scoped out the work required to build the MVP of their product and then executed on an aggressive development roadmap. We rebuilt the SaaS application's front-end and built out substantial amounts of new functionality.

Get in touch 👋

If you're working on an innovative web or AI software product, then I'd love to hear about it. If we both see value in working together, we can move forward. And if not—we both had a nice chat and have a new connection.
Send me an email at hello@sophiabits.com