Jan 2023 – Jul 2023 · 6 mos

• I believe the invention & proliferation of highly capable AI systems, eventually reaching full autonomy and generality, will be the defining trend of the 21st Century. I therefore decided to take the time to better understand this space and move full-time into AI safety, to ensure this future with AI is safe and positive for humanity. Included meeting people, building hands-on projects, sharing learnings via The AGI Show podcast (www.theagishow.com), and completing the ARENA ML Safety bootcamp (https://www.arena.education/) in London.

Oct 2022 – Feb 2023 · 4 mos

• Focused on mission-critical, cross-functional projects required for Vow & cultured meat to succeed.

Jan 2022 – Oct 2022 · 9 mos

• Established & managed first Tech team (~35 people at largest), which encompassed all R&D, including scientists, engineers, manufacturing.

Feb 2020 – Jan 2022 · 1 yr 11 mos

• 1st engineer, built Eng team from 0 to 8 people, incl. software & hardware. Lab & workflow automation mainly, some manufacturing strategy & team building.

Jul 2021 – Present · 4 yrs 10 mos

• Ripe Robotics builds and manages fruit picking robots. Growers contract us to pick their fruit at a better price and higher quality than a human picker.
• 20% of fruit is wasted at the farm with picking too early, too late or causing damage. Ripe Robotics uses computer vision and robotics to analyse, select and pick the fruit at the right time to maximise food value and minimise waste.

Dec 2019 – Jul 2021 · 1 yr 7 mos

Nov 2019 – Feb 2020 · 3 mos · Greater Sydney Area

• We automate and build technical capabilities for biotech teams across their lab & bio-facility workflows. If you have software, hardware or data challenges in your lab or bio-facility, reach out. Real-world example projects:
• Cultivated meat company:
• Data system and label printing for tracking lab assets and experiments in a unified, flexible system. Built for company's ideal workflow.
• Microscope imaging automation to allow high-throughput image capture, all automatically catalogued in the company's data system for easy retrieval and analysis. Save scientists time and energy to focus on higher value endeavours.
• Soil microbial company:
• Data system and label printing for tracking lab assets in a unified, flexible system. Built for company's ideal workflow.
• Automated data pipeline from in-field, offline data collection to online asset system built with Node, AWS Lambda and API Gateway.

Apr 2019 – Jul 2019 · 3 mos · San Francisco Bay Area · Remote

• Designed + built a secrets management solution

Nov 2018 – Nov 2019 · 1 yr · Multiple locations in NZ, Australia, USA, LATAM

• In Nov 2018, I decided to focus my energy on solving the world's biggest food sustainability challenges, across human health, food security, the environment, and animal welfare. To that end, I conducted independent research and consulting projects across the food system, eventually focusing my time exclusively on alternative proteins. Projects included:
• Work on 3 farms in New Zealand (two organic produce farms, one dairy heifer grazing) to better understand the lives and daily challenges of our primary producers
• For an Australian plant-based company: supermarket interviews of plant-based food shoppers
• A week-long visit to speak to large broadacre growers in Moree, NSW about their interest in growing plant protein crops (chickpea, mung bean etc)
• Significant reading & many industry discussions to understand:
• a) Cellular agriculture methods and challenges
• b) Plant protein sources, including their supply, characterisation and functionalisation
• c) Agtech / precision ag methods and challenges
• I publish many of the concrete problems, solutions and unifying themes I uncover here: https://airtable.com/shrKSHLK32tzeMqpu

Mar 2017 – Aug 2018 · 1 yr 5 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Plaid (latest valuation: USD$6bn) is a developer platform and API to help innovators build on top of banking infrastructure. I was there during hypergrowth (15 -> 170 employees) & managed three different teams:
• Cybersecurity* -- Managed Plaid's first dedicated cybersec team. Hired two senior security engineers, managed a team of external security consultants, and pushed forward multiple key security initiatives.
• Platform (SRE/Tooling)* -- Formed the first production infrastructure / tooling team and its mission, grew to ~5-6 team members until it was stable and successful, very rewarding team.
• Bank integrations* -- Plaid's core integrations with our banking partners. Very brittle but critical infrastructure that needed to remain as robust as possible.
• Other initiatives* -- created engineer oncall rotation, designed technical interviews, conducted hundreds of interviews across many roles, created project retro template, and other engineering process improvements.

Apr 2015 – Mar 2017 · 1 yr 11 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• I worked as a Backend software engineer on projects including:
• Plaid's v2 API (https://plaid.com/docs/) -- rebuilt core API from scratch w/ 3 other engineers
• Integrations with our bank partners (Node.js)
• End-to-end testing infrastructure (JS Mocha, Jenkins, GitHub Enterprise)

Dec 2013 – Mar 2015 · 1 yr 3 mos · Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Area

• Founded profitable software development company with two other cofounders. Projects included:
• Automated Bitcoin Arbitrage Bot*
• For a hedge fund in NYC: Built a Bitcoin arbitrage bot to pull orderbooks from Bitcoin exchanges, normalize and trade based on strategies. Built using Golang + PostgreSQL DB.
• Custom Facebook Referral Program*
• For a wedding startup in Raleigh: built app that pulled from Facebook API, selected engaged friends and sent app invites. Utilized responsive Bootstrap, SASS, PHP, CodeIgniter, MySQL DB (client's tech stack).

May 2011 – Dec 2013 · 2 yrs 7 mos · Berlin Metropolitan Area

• Co-founded a gamified investment education platform targeted at beginning investors.
• Designed and built the site alongside co-founder
• Scaled the platform to 40,000 visitors a month on Amazon EC2
• Used organic marketing to increase user base to over 70,000 users
• Developed A/B tests and used gamification to optimize conversion funnels
• Raised $100,000 in seed capital from 3 angel investors and managed investor relations
• Hired and managed a full-time marketing manager as well as chief editor and several blog writers
• Exited to a buyer in December 2013

May 2010 – Aug 2010 · 3 mos