Sophia Willows

Rye is an a16z-backed startup making APIs to sell anything on the Internet. With a single integration, developers can sell 500M+ product SKUs.

Crimson Global Academy is the second largest online high school in the world, and I’m leading the team building its EdTech platform. * Evangelizing best practices, and pushing the team to deliver higher quality software with greater velocity * Working closely with the product and design teams to scope and correctly prioritize new pieces of work * Operating across Crimson’s engineering teams to architect and guide organization-wide projects * Directly managing four engineers and ensuring their ongoing professional development

Tech stack: React, Node.js, GraphQL, Kubernetes, Terraform

I was the first AI Faculty member added to Deltaschool. I advised the director on how to structure the initial curriculum based on my previous experience running programming and AI bootcamps/workshops. The "AI Fellowship" program is a four-week program where ambitious high school students are taught machine learning and AI topics, and then go on to build an app to solve a real-world problem they have identified. I now continue to produce and teach workshops during each cycle of the program. Selected workshop topics: * "Advanced Generative AI: Introduction to GANs" * "You need both cats and dogs: Systematic LLM evaluation"

* Drove implementation and managed development of the AdmitYogi Essays (or “Dr Ivy”) product * Worked with PM and internal human essay review team to design architecture for reviewing college admission essays with AI * Hired contractor at the end of the project to work on future roadmap items * Product has since reviewed 24,000+ essays Deep dive: https://sophiabits.com/retro/admityogi Tech stack: LLMs, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Python, React, TRPC, TypeScript, Vercel

* Architecting the Kwotimation product: carefully making tech stack decisions and figuring out the right balance between the various concerns of software development. * General day-to-day development of the product. * Managing a team of developers according to the Agile software development methodology. * Liaising with the executive team and investors as the point of contact for the development team. Gathering requirements, relaying progress, and shaping the product strategy in order to maximize value. * Assisting with talent acquisition through conducting technical interviews. * Implementation and management of the CI/CD pipeline. * Code reviews Technologies: MERN stack + Redux, AWS, Ansible, Cypress, Docker, Jest, Lerna, Terraform, & TypeScript

Tutoring and marking assignments for University of Waikato’s “Advanced Networking and Cyber Security” paper

Various freelance projects utilizing a wide range of technologies.

I worked at Waikato Innovation Park Limited over the summer, tasked with designing and implementing a new client reporting system for them. They see a huge number of business clients each month and previously managed their data on paper and an Excel spreadsheet. * Documented their business process from end-to-end by shadowing the team during work * Deployed and configured a Microsoft Dynamics CRM instance for them * Developed a toolchain of scripts which pull in and transform data from external systems, in order to make sure all data points match with the data ontology I modelled for them * Training the team to use the new systems effectively Technologies: C#, web scraping, RESTful APIs, Microsoft Dynamics

Papers: * Managing Innovation and Value Creation (A) * Strategic Management and Decision Making (A)

Gap years in 2018 and 2019 in order to pursue side projects and self-education. 2nd in "Advanced Networking & Cybersecurity" (A+) 2nd in "Engineering Self-Adaptive Systems" (A+) 6th in "Software Engineering Methodology" (A+) "Functional Programming" (A+) "Practical Data Mining" (A+) “Cyber Security” (A+) “Malware Analysis and Penetration Testing” (A+) "Software Engineering Industry Project" (A+) "Engineering and Environment" (A+) "Engineering Mathematics 3" (A+) "Design and Analysis of Algorithms" (A, extra credit in one assignment: "Your GUI looks amazing and is incredibly extensive [...] Your program is quick even for the larger maps.") 2x Directed Study (A+) "Database Practice and Experience" (A+) "Computer Systems" (A+) "Programming with Data Structures" (A+) "Software Engineering Development" (A+) “User Experience” (A+)