Kunal Shah

• Led product and engineering of a Fidelity-backed "DeFi" startup building an on-chain algorithmic trading platform & SDK for quantitative traders
• Led refactor of Rust-based execution management system to reduce transaction latency
• Led development of backtesting framework, protocol and chain integrations, and SDK for quantitative traders

• Led partnerships, technology, and consumer product functions for a home affordability startup
• Developed an end-to-end process for managing transactions between lenders, title agencies, realtors, regulators and consumers

• Chartered and managed five product-feature teams across the full SDLC
• Proposed and led creation of a patent-pending, industry-first pricing & eligibility engine for real-time evaluation of personalized loan scenarios
• Acted as a key technical partner across the broader organization in driving complex integrations, partnerships, and major product initiatives
• Refined and scaled interview process, interviewed hundreds of engineers, trained interviewers, 'sold' candidates, and directed team placement
• Designed, managed, and led the onboarding and continuing education process for the entire 10,000+ person organization

We provide a real-time, normalized and audited feed of public short interest disclosures to institutional clients. Client list includes marquee firms such as AQR, Point72, Citadel, and Millennium Capital.

Draft.com (Acquired by Betfair / Flutter Entertainment)

Draft.com began a major marketing spend ahead of the 2017 NFL Season. I was brought on to scale the backend, identified bottlenecks in the app code, architecture, and underlying libraries, and provided remedies for each. I also built a massively concurrent real-time websocket/HTTP load testing tool to prove out scalability. Draft is now part of FanDuel.

Green Business Partnership

Green Business Partnership evolved out of a Westchester County Government effort to help businesses adopt sustainable practices. I developed a comprehensive web application featuring Stripe-powered membership, subscription, and sponsorship management. The core of the platform guided companies through detailed surveys collecting operational data such as energy usage and waste production, which fed into a spreadsheet-like engine of interdependent formulas to evaluate their performance across sustainability metrics.

Medly Pharmacy

Medly Pharmacy was a prescription delivery startup in NYC. In collaboration with Posse, I worked closely with the client to build the backend and administrative interfaces supporting their mobile app launch.

Swill

I built an inventory pipeline that extracted, transformed, and normalized data from thousands of point-of-sale systems into a single stream of product inventory across all of Swill's partner stores. This involved a complex information retrieval and extraction hierarchy, a machine-trained model for new product discovery, and a suite of heuristics to achieve high-accuracy real-time output.

EnhancedMood

I was contracted by a physician to develop an iOS app (ReactNative) for mood tracking. Users checked in to their current emotional state and received content-based rewards, a technique designed to interrupt cycles of negative thought. The program entered an NYU accelerator.

Vive Style

Led development at Vive.co as a contractor, working with the CEO to shape the product roadmap. Coordinated with designers to establish a structured development process and delivered features across their Rails, iOS, and Android platforms.

Parachute Health

I worked with Parachute Health to create a microservice backend and API to securely and compliantly verify the eligibility of incoming patient insurance data for an array of medical products. This involved very strict validation, composable rules, and in the case of failure, detailed responses and steps to correct.

BibMe / Citation Machine (acquired by Chegg)

BibMe and Citation Machine are high-traffic citation services for students and researchers. I expanded the number of citable sources to over 7,000 and built a cross-platform interactive search tool for source discovery, as part of a larger redesign to boost ad revenue and usability which I led.

Founding engineer and product lead at Urtak. Urtak built a highly innovative collaborative polling technology with extraordinarily high engagement rates. Urtaks were featured alongside articles and seeded with questions posed by authors and editors. Users contributed additional yes/no questions, enriching the poll over time.

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I worked on the core product and built out the statistics and visualization platform to better understand and present our data.

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• Worked with business, operations and engineering to develop and direct a product roadmap
• Created and owned processes surrounding infrastructure provisioning and deployment
• Developed deployment, branch management, code maintenance, testing, and quality strategies
• Served on the production operations team

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• Developed, launched, and maintained high-traffic data-driven content management systems for clients including Redken, L'Oréal, Visiting Nurse Service of New York, Communications of the ACM, Harvard Business School, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, and Atlantic Philanthropies
• Worked closely with internal producers to directly collaborate with clients
• Worked with and contributed back to open source projects
• Practiced test/behavior-driven development

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• My first venture — started at age 12
• Featured in The Independent
• Microsoft IIS, ColdFusion, MSSQL

Education

• Researched nanoscale drug delivery vehicles and copolymers for tissue engineering
• Routinely performed cloning, culturing, expression, purification, and spectroscopy
• Cloned a library of protein polymers for nanoscale drug encapsulation
• Performed kinetics and fluorescence studies to measure substrate binding and activity
• Work presented at the American Chemical Society National Conference

• BS Chemistry, biomedical sciences concentration
• Awarded Simeon Gang Excellence in Biotechnology Award
• Student Government VP
• Founded an outdoor interest group, the Polytechnic Mountain & River Club

Skills

Languages: Python, Rust, TypeScript, & Ruby
Frameworks: Django, FastAPI, Flask, Rails, Express.js, Nest.js, Next.js, React, ReactNative, tokio, Redux, GraphQL, Svelte
Datastores: PostgreSQL, RDS, Dynamo, Snowflake, Redis, memcached, S3, ElasticSearch
DevOps: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, statsd/Datadog, CI/CD pipelines
Machine Learning: Named Entity Recognition, Text classification, Agents

Projects & Experiments

Up On The Board

Up On The Board was a public, self-cleaning pinboard where old posts slowly disappeared unless upvoted. Posts could be submitted via tweet, email, SMS, or the web. The pinboard flowed responsively, showing only the number of posts that fit the viewing device. Each board included a Chromecast integration for use as an office memorandum board.

Humble Suggestions was an experiment in contextual resurfacing of saved content. Built on the insight that queued content has optimal moments for consumption — the right article or video at the right time — it monitored context signals to deliver timely reminders. I shut down the service after Netflix discontinued their API.