My career started in the AI realm with a degree in Data Science from Cal, graduating in the fall of 2020. The field looked quite different at that time, with large language models just starting to catch fire. I started off in a hybrid DS/SWE role at an enterprise company, Juniper Networks, working on a chatbot powered by BERT, the language model built on (at the time) breakthrough transformer architecture. Through this experience I learned that I was particularly excited by building software features, in addition to being close to end users and shipping with fast dev cycles. I figured the best environment to lean into this excitement would be at an early stage startup.

In 2022, I left Juniper Networks to become a Product Engineer at a Series A startup building a universal e-commerce API, Rutter. Shortly after I joined, the company pivoted to accounting platform APIs, enabling fintech products such as expense management tools. In hindsight, this was an incredible opportunity for me to be on the ground floor of building out a new product from 0-1.

My experience at Rutter exposed me to working hands on with end users to design and build. I loved the personal interaction that came with user engagement, including understanding their different workflows, and figuring out what to build to serve them in a meaningful way. It was thrilling to see a customer delighted by something I had created. My identification with being a "product minded engineer" began to stick.

During my two years at Rutter, progress in the LLM realm took off. I found myself incredibly curious about the technology emerging, which seemed capable of changing the world as we know it. I was fascinated and wanted to dive in. I focused my next job search on looking for a team that was building with and for AI. Along came my transition to Arc Technologies, an early stage cash management platform with an internal Eng team incubating an agentic AI platform for private market investors. Six months into joining, our team spun off into a separate incorporation, F2, to focus our efforts on what we believed to be a promising product of its own.

I've had the pleasure of working on a lean, but mighty, engineering team at F2 that incorporates new AI tools into our day-to-day dev cycles to push forward our velocity, as well as inspire the AI solutions we're bringing to the financial space. We stay on the bleeding edge of breakthroughs and approaches to building agentic systems, always iterating on our approach to hone our agent and deliver intuitive solutions for our users.

It is incredible to look back at where I started—building a chatbot with BERT, to now again building a chatbot, with an entirely new, supercharged set of technology. How exciting to look towards the path ahead!

If you got this far, thanks for reading :)