Markus – Typescript, React Native, Express.js

It is a research app developed to strengthen communities in the face of climate-related events. During severe weather events (snow, heavy rain, high wind, extreme heat), it allows neighbors to post jobs that need to be completed that other neighbors can volunteer to help with.

• Designed and built a mobile app where users create jobs with defined weather-event triggers and job details;
• Built the volunteer flow: users explore jobs that interest them and volunteer; when a weather event triggers a job, volunteers receive a push notification, and a single volunteer can accept it, then get a timeframe and details to complete the task;
• Added two-way ratings on completion (volunteer and job owner rate each other) and a points system rewarding volunteers;
• Designed and implemented trust and safety features, including a cancellation control system that automatically restricted users from accepting new jobs after repeated cancellations until an administrative review, improving platform reliability and job completion rates.

A professional networking platform designed for researchers, PhD holders, and academics, enabling members to connect, communicate, collaborate on research, and discover career and funding opportunities. The platform combined social networking features, real-time messaging, community engagement, and opportunity discovery to foster collaboration within the academic community.

• Designed, developed, and launched the platform end-to-end, deploying the production application on Vercel;
• Implemented an invitation-only onboarding workflow with an admin approval queue, including automated email notifications for pending membership requests;
• Built core networking features, including a searchable member directory, connection management, and real-time direct messaging;
• Developed an opportunities marketplace where administrators could publish opportunities and members could discover and apply for them;
• Created a collaboration hub that enabled users to share research, grant, and professional collaboration opportunities with the wider community;
• Implemented a unified notification system, delivering both in-app notifications and transactional emails for key user activities;
• Built a feature-flagged academic journal management module, allowing users to create and promote journals once enabled by administrators based on community growth.

A next-generation relationship platform designed to support users throughout the entire relationship journey—from discovering compatible partners to maintaining long-term relationships. The platform combined intelligent matching, interactive in-app dating experiences, and post-match engagement features, creating an ecosystem that continued to provide value after users found a partner rather than ending at the matching stage.

• Designed and built a proprietary two-stage, bidirectional match-filter system that solved a major market pain: wasted matches from one-directional preference matching. An initial pass surfaces users who fit the authenticated user's preferences; a second pass confirms the authenticated user fits the candidate's preferences - greatly improving the odds of mutually viable matches and eliminating dead-end right-swipes that never get served to the other side;
• Built an in-app marketplace for purchasable dating "experiences" - the company partners with local businesses/restaurants to offer app-exclusive experiences couples can buy - integrating Stripe as the payment processor (physical/real-world goods);
• Designed a relationship-continuity feature: a user can send an exclusive request to a matched partner, and on acceptance, the app converts its UI from partner-finding to shared-experience-finding - so the product grows with the relationship instead of being uninstalled;
• Delivered the go-to-market surface too: a landing page for email capture and a marketing page for launch, and coordinated a graphic designer for campaign assets, branding, and logo design;
• Owned system architecture, database design, REST API design, UI/UX design, and deployment infrastructure as the sole engineer.

The platform's core target audience was SMB and allowed them to create SMS based campaigns for marketing. This platform relied heavily on the Twilio infrastructure, and my core roles and responsibilities were to stabilize the legacy platform, fix existing bugs, and extend functionality with feature development.

• Resolved a critical throughput bottleneck by replacing a monolithic messaging component with a microservice, scaling the SMS/voice platform to 10,000+ concurrent messages with sub-second delivery latency; • Built HubSpot and MailChimp integrations that expanded platform capabilities and reduced manual customer workflows by 50%; • Incrementally upgraded a production Laravel/PHP platform (AWS, RDS, SQS, Twilio), improving uptime and reliability for thousands of SMB customers, and extended a sibling business-texting product (Sales Message).