Avand Amiri

Professional Experience

Airbnb San Francisco, CA · airbnb.com

Full-stack Engineer

Ruby, Rails 5.x, JavaScript, React

Creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere.

  • Karma: Built an internal tool that reports on online product bugs, performance, accessibility, security, and availability.
  • Bug reporting tools: Built and maintain all the internal bug reporting and triage tools.
  • Nerds@: Co-produce the quarterly engineering all-hands.

Mystery Science San Francisco, CA · mysteryscience.com

Lead Engineer & Designer

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: mys.ci/rocks/1)
    • 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 · sqoot.com

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.).

Fave Media, Inc. Chicago, IL · getfave.com

Tech Lead

Ruby, Rails 2.x, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, Sphinx, nginx

Fave Media drove millions of visitors each month to their local business directory through organic search. The product has since been abandoned.

  • Bulk Data Imports: Developed a system that regularly updated tens of millions of local business listings.
  • Scrum: Managed a team of five; ran weekly sprints and daily stand-ups.
  • Sales Automation: Integrated with a CRM (Highrise) that allowed the sales team to manage tens of thousands of leads.

Gorilla Chicago, IL

Engineer

Ruby, Rails 2.x, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Subversion

Gorilla was a boutique web development consultancy. I built websites for clients based on designer specifications. Projects included:

  • Spex Chicago, an optical retailer (Ruby on Rails)
  • Northpoint Horizons, an educational company (ASP.NET)

Clarity Consulting Chicago, IL · claritycon.com

Engagement Engineer

C#, .NET, SQL Server 2005, Visual SourceSafe, Subversion

Worked on Crate & Barrel’s point of sale and Echo Global Logistics’ marketplace integrations and performance.

Peregrine Financial Group Chicago, IL

Help Desk & Junior Web Developer

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Classic ASP, C#, ASP.NET

Built and maintained company websites, managed company email, built servers, and fixed hardware issues.

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.

Stork github.com/avand/stork

Stork is a Rack app that bundles CSS and JS. I developed it before Rails had an asset pipeline.

Education

DePaul University Chicago, IL

College of Computing and Digital Media

  • GPA 3.9
  • Top of the Sophomore Class in 2007

References

“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