How did I get to where I am today?
I started out as a kid who enjoyed building and creating as a child. I remember, when I was about six or seven, building a a “deer pen” out of fallen tree limbs, nails and rope at my father’s friend’s house on Martha’s Vineyard. However, I still didn’t really know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, just like any other kid. However, that all changed when I entered high school.
Most people have a teacher or friend that really helped define them. For me, it was my high school. I went to Aviation High School in Sunnyside Queens, NY, a specialized high school for aircraft maintenance. It was here that I fell in love with troubleshooting and engineering. I learned so many invaluable skills here. To this day, I annoy everyone I work with by rambling on about how airplanes work and cool trivia facts about planes. Because of Aviation, I decided to study to become an engineer.
It wasn’t until college, when I cofounded my first startup, that I truly realized what I love doing. The entire process of building the product and scaling the business was an amazing experience that I relish to this day. I fell in love with entrepreneurship with LykeMe.
My Experience
I have been building websites for over 12 years. I got my start building websites for Michigan State University’s Health IT (or HIT) department while pursuing my computer science degree. I worked on establishing their mobile first CSS strategy (when that was a thing), rewriting their sites using sass and HTML5, developed strategies for “modularizing” their platform for website creation (which was Cascade Server), established modern development practices like gitflow. While most of the work done here was pretty small scale, it was still a great learning experience.
I co-founded my first startup while working for HIT. I was responsible for our technology strategy and leading our team. I built and led our technology team of 5. I’m not going to lie, we made a lot of mistakes and I wouldn’t use a lot of code that I wrote up during those days, but I really learned a lot. I hosted our infrastructure on AWS using various services (primarily EC2), so a lot of sys admin skills I learned , I learned during these days. Since my team and I were pretty green, I had to learn how to mentor and lead pretty quickly, something I am constantly looking to improve.
After I graduated from MSU, I started working with SPLT, helping them through an acquisition. I helped maintain their iPhone Application and I built out their Non Emergency Medical Transportation platform, maintaining their Lyft partnership and integrations, as well as develop their training program for users.
After SPLT, I worked at Red Ventures, leading the deposits team on Bankrate.com. Here I helped deliver a few key initiatives. I led the shift from legacy C# technology into a modern Typescript, GraphQL, NodeJS stack. I was also involved in shifting left on our cloud infrastructure, where our team was responsible for building, monitoring, and managing our cloud infrastructure for our applications.
After RedVentures, I joined Amazon where I was on a few different teams. I started out on the Seller Central API team, building out the authentication and authorization for the entire Seller Central API. After that team, I worked on the Spectrometer team, where we collected and processed a ton of data related to web performance on our Seller Central pages.
After a little while, this team morphed into to capturing HEART metrics for our pages, focusing specifically on the Happiness of our customers by surveying them. I led the design and implementation of our surveying targeting technology. This worked by pulling a bunch of data from our data warehouse, loading them into an S3 bucket, and indexing the targeting data into a dynamoDB table using Step Functions.
After Amazon, I joined NerdWallet, leading engineering on our credit card team. On Credit Cards, I worked on a bunch of different initiatives. I started by helping to deliver a migration to NextJS. Once we wrapped up this initiative, I worked on our performance marketing team, where I was responsible for our personalization tools. I worked on NerdWallet’s Nerdup Credit Card. Here I built out our APIs, worked on the mobile app to allow Nerdup users the ability to manage their credit cards.
Get in Touch
I love meeting new people and I would love to start a great community around our shared passions. If you want to get in touch, drop me a line at yoseph@shuttl.io!.