# AJ Olson > Product, Engineering, & Design Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/ajolson I am a builder at heart — of products, teams, and companies. I draw from broad skills and experience spanning software engineering, product design, research, game design, consumer applications, and enterprise product management. Track record ranges from founding startups with successful exits to building, leading, and developing exceptional Product, Engineering, and Design teams at global organizations. Also, I make puns. ## Work Experience ### Founder @ Pregravity Jan 2025 – Present We are a small game studio crafting clever, human-centered games that engage and challenge—smartly leveraging AI to deepen gameplay and interactions. We have three core games; the first is a fun multi-player word game (in beta), the second is a single-player word game (in active development), and the third is a much more involved non-word game (currently in pre-production). ### Product, Design, and Engineering @ Disco Travel Jan 2024 – Present Helping you turn your saved credit card points by delivering curated travel deals directly to you. We simplify the complex process of travel hacking, points transfers, and date optimizations that you can make the most of your points, and spend less time booking and more time traveling. Follow us or give it a download (currently only on iOS): IG: https://www.instagram.com/discotravelapp/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@discotravelapp Download: https://download.discotravel.app ### Vice President, Product Management & Vice President, Global Design @ Cision Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 Led Cision's Product Platform group as well as its Global Design organization, including the User Research and Product Design teams. Responsible for research, validation, and product design on multiple products supporting several active products, including PR Newswire, Cision Communications Cloud, CisionOne, Insights, and several new product initiatives. Led cross-functional teams of data scientists, engineers, and designers for special projects, including to build and leverage bespoke Generative AI built on top of Google Cloud's Vertex AI. ### Mobile Strategy @ Cision Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 Leading strategy, planning, UX research and discovery, UX design, and engineering for the Cision mobile app, a tool for communications and public-relations professionals. ### Executive Director, Engineering @ Valassis Jan 2017 – Jan 2021 | Austin, Texas Area Led multiple full-stack and mobile engineering teams distributed across US offices. Responsible for both critical consumer-facing sites and internal tools. Relocated from SF to Austin to integrate MaxPoint, a newly-acquired company. Helped integrate Engineering and Product by merging tools, process, and platforms. Reduced AWS spend by identifying applications to sunset or to migrate to shared infrastructure. Evangelized and developed a shared UI component library and web application scaffolding for faster development across the organization. ### Director, UX and Mobile @ Valassis Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area Recruited, hired, and led a team of mobile and frontend engineers. Led development of mobile SDKs, proofs of concept, and custom apps for client pitches and marketing events. Provided design and interactive prototypes for responses to RFPs. Served as lead engineer for an internal campaign configuration tool, architecting and writing the frontend stack (Node, React, Redux, Material UI). Performed UX research and provided UX and visual design. Designed and directed development of a mobile app to meet USPS Emerging Technology Program requirements, resulting in a cumulative bottom-line increase of $30M+. ### Sr Software Engineer @ PayPal Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 | San Jose, California, United States Joined PayPal through acquisition of our five-person startup, Truvie Security. Served as engineering lead for PayPal Working Capital and performed onsite user experience research in key markets: Sydney, Australia; London, England; San Jose, CA; and Austin, TX. Built the product from skunkworks to standout success: PayPal Working Capital has lent over $10B, enabling over 220k businesses to succeed and grow. Developed device fingerprinting libraries in Objective-C and JavaScript, in use on millions of devices across the PayPal and eBay ecosystems, significantly reducing loss due to fraud. Prototyped iOS applications to showcase biometric authentication and efficient mobile payment flows. ### Founding Engineer @ Truvie Security, Inc. (acquired by PayPal in May 2011) Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 Designed and built a system to monitor and collect user behavior on merchant websites and fingerprint user devices. Built basic models to predict the likelihood of intent to commit fraud (eg, use a stolen credit card, account takeover, etc.). ### Senior Engineer @ ohai, inc. Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 ### Co-Founder @ Rockstarted, LLC (acquired by Ohai, Inc in August 2008) Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 Built viral social gaming applications that were released on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and Hi5. Acquired by Ohai, Inc. ### Frontend Engineer @ meebo Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 ## Education ### Symbolic Systems Stanford University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/alexanderjolson --- Source: https://flows.cv/ajolson JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/ajolson/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13