Avand Amiri

Professional Experience

Airbnb San Francisco, CA · airbnb.com

Sr. Software Engineer, Internal Products

JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Firebase

  • Awedience: In response to the pandemic, I created a virtual auditorium product that brings the company together during remote company meetings. Employees virtually sit around live-streamed content, expressing emoji-responses and short messages from their seats in real-time. Watch a 2 minute demo (password: gogetter) or read the blog post.
  • Internal jobs board: I contributed to a job board employees could use to find new opportunities, integrated with existing recruiting tools. Think careers.airbnb.com but specifically for employees.
  • Team pages: I contributed to the internal team browser, featuring hierarchical navigation, and customizable team pages.

Sr. Software Engineer, Quality, Feedback & Bugs

Ruby, Rails 5.x, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, SQL, Airflow

  • Bug reporting: I built an integration to CS tools that enables bug reports to be quickly and easily captured alongside customer tickets. I also maintained the web and mobile tools employees used to file bugs.
  • Prioritization & alerts: I built a tool for product teams to quantify the impact of bugs, performance, accessibility, security, and availability. Integrating Jira and CS tools, it also sends interactive notifications to teams via Slack that dramatically decreases triage time.
  • Feedback widget: I created reusable customer-facing feedback intake component that became backbone of an internal tool teams use to explore 7.5k+ entries/mo from over 20+ installs site-wide.

Going Above & Beyond

  • Core Values interviewer: Interviewed hundreds of applicants including executive level candidates and contributed to evaluation rubric that was adopted company-wide.
  • Engineering Meeting: I voluntarily produced this quarterly meeting for two years. I inspired hundreds of engineers to participate & contribute, up-leveled content, developed segments, and directed live shows, streamed worldwide. Peek the promo (password: inspiring) or catch my own presentation on the efficacy of my team’s process (password: hireavand).

Mystery Science San Francisco, CA · mysteryscience.com

Founding Engineer, Full Stack

Ruby, Rails 4.x, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Postgres

Mystery Science builds open-and-go science lessons for elementary school teachers and homeschoolers.

  • Product: Talked to customers, analyzed usage data, designed solutions, and managed process. Projects include:
    • Lesson viewer: A PowerPoint-like tool used to create lessons that teachers would present to students (example).
    • Internal tools: Dashboards, account administration, sales, and support.
    • Growth: Referral-focused onboarding drove 100k signups in two months.
    • Redesign concept: Mobile-friendly prototype designed to get visitors closer to the product (bit.ly/ms-rose).
  • Design: Visual design, information hierarchy, and user flows for multiple personas (teachers, school administrators, home schoolers, and staff).
  • Engineering: Web application development, testing, code architecture, feature development, and bug fixes.
  • Operations: Database management, scaling, performance, caching, and release management.

General Assembly San Francisco, CA · generalassemb.ly

Part-time Instructor

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node

General Assembly provides courses in UX, data science, web development, project management, and design for adults.

  • Over 700 hours: Taught 11 instances of the part-time Front-End Web Development course (bit.ly/gafewd).
  • Curriculum: Developed a curriculum from scratch (fewd.avandamiri.com) to teach HTML, CSS, and JS to people with no prior experience.

TaskRabbit San Francisco, CA · taskrabbit.com

Senior Software Engineer

Ruby, Rails 3.x, HTML, CSS, JavaScript

TaskRabbit manages a part-time workforce to help people with everyday tasks.

  • Business Services Tech Lead: Led the engineering team that built tools for business clients.
  • Rabbit Web: Built tools for the people running tasks.
  • Intellihelp: Contextual help that reduced support inquiries by 12% in under 100 LOC (bit.ly/intellihelp).
  • Task Close Potential: Wrote an algorithm that helped prioritize inbound worker applications based on geography and schedule.

Sqoot Chicago, IL

Founder

Ruby, Rails 3.x, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Postgres, Mongo, Redis, Solr

Sqoot (acquired by Clutch in 2013) aggregates deals & coupons, making them available to developers and publishers to monetize their apps and websites.

  • Local Deal API: Built a web-service that served millions of requests for deals by category, price, and location.
  • Data Import & Normalization: Architected a system that downloaded and imported data from almost 100 vendors (Groupon, LivingSocial, etc.).

Open Source Contributions

Sprinkles github.com/avand/sprinkles

Inspired by ActiveSupport, Sprinkles adds intuitive helper methods and practical CSS utilities to make working in a browser a little sweeter.

Education

DePaul University Chicago, IL

College of Computing and Digital Media

  • GPA 3.9
  • Top of the Sophomore Class in 2007

References

“It’s so easy for you to jump into different modes of thinking: technical engineering, designing/UI, product ideation and conceptualizing, project management, selling others on the idea. Being able to manage that end-to-end is a rare and wonderful gift.” Cathy Miller, Product Manager at Airbnb
“Avand is an amazing engineer who dreams big and gets stuff done for our Airbnb Community and with everyone around him.” Andy Yasutake, Director of Product Management at Airbnb
“You’re such a creative thinker who is also able to execute big things. It’s super admirable and you’re also just a great person to be around.” Laura Kelly, Engineer at Airbnb
“I wanted to say thank you for being such an incredible ambassador for our culture and values at Airbnb. You truly embody [the CEO’s] principles of being an ‘owner and not a renter,’ champion the mission in all that you do, and bring us all closer together as employees.” William Chiu, Recruiter at Airbnb
“Avand is a unique combination of passionate and action oriented. He has been a tireless promoter of quality not just because it’s the right thing for hosts and guests and our products, but because he wants to actively promote and enable and improve the entire engineering org. I haven't worked with another engineer who’s taken matters into his own hands on such a big and complex issue as [quality]. Avand is impressively product oriented in a way that enabled the team to ship more work. Avand is an enabler and a culture changer, and he does it not just through his passion and influence but also by cranking out high quality work that affects the entire company and improves our culture of quality.” Judd Antin, Director, Experience Research at Airbnb
“Avand goes far above and beyond in terms of his impact across eng and the entire company. He strives to make things better overall, and he does all of this in addition to his day-to-day engineering role, where he is greatly exceeding by inspiring, driving the team, and delivering results.” Darrick Brown, Engineering Manager at Airbnb
“It’s rare you find an engineer who cares as much about the design as they do the development of a product. Fortunately Avand is that engineer. He truly cares about the product and advocates for the customer. Even if it makes his role as an engineer more difficult, so long as it makes the product easier to use he’s all about it. You don’t find engineers like Avand everyday!” Shay Howe, Director of Product at Belly
“I was always impressed by the passion Avand brought to his work. Avand isn’t just a strong software engineer, he also has great product design sense and is incredible with people. He knows how to bring out the best in himself and his team. It’s rare to find someone who has that cross-section of skills.” Shawn Reigsecker, CEO at Centro
“I’ve hired Avand in the past and would hire him again without hesitation. He is an excellent builder, communicator, and teammate. He has a versatile but focused skill set that allows him to contribute effectively towards all aspects of software development.” Nick Kishfy, CEO at MojoTech
“You want Avand on your team. It’s incredibly rare to find someone with his range of skills and passion for building great products. Full stack engineer, product designer, amazing teammate. He’s the total package.” Eric Berson, Director of Sales at Mystery Science
“The only person I can be sure cares about what they’re doing as much as I do, if not more, is Avand. He has a relentless, almost uncompromising desire to do the best possible work, whatever it might be. It’s incredibly refreshing. I’ve worked with Avand several times over the years, and I’ve never enjoyed working with anymore more—you’d be lucky to have a chance to work with him.” Brandon Weiss, Engineering Manager at Intercom