# Cait Powell > Senior Software Engineer at Pilot.com Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/cait I'm a product-focused software engineer with a passion for building beautiful, scalable, and performant web applications that facilitate intuitive and functional user experience. I enjoy working across the stack and I'm skilled at working with teams of other engineers, UX designers, business partners, and third-party vendors to deliver products that suit the needs of all stakeholders. I also believe in the importance of making computer science accessible to women, girls, queer people, people of color, and other underrepresented groups — the best technology is technology that's built with the voices, interests, and concerns of a diverse group of people and communities in mind. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Pilot.com Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Senior Software Engineer @ Nearside Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area As the lead frontend engineer for Nearside's business checking web client, I worked to drive initiatives to re-brand and re-style our frontend using a new in-house design system and to fully migrate the Nearside web app from one backing bank to another. This involved working with designers, backend engineers, and infrastructure engineers to architect, scope, and implement a strategy both to re-build the business banking web client against an entirely new backend and to migrate users to the new web client while continuing to support users with legacy accounts. ### Lead Web Engineer @ Asana Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area As a technical lead on Asana's web engineering team, I worked with a team of frontend and fullstack developers to build, maintain, and enhance Asana.com at every level of the tech stack, from design patterns to frontend architecture to our DevOps pipeline. Asana.com is the gateway to both Asana's business and the Asana web app, and it handles the initial top-of-the-funnel experience for all potential self-serve Asana customers, so our team's goal was always to help visitors to Asana.com become satisfied Asana users and to ensure that Asana.com content creators could seamlessly and smoothly create new Asana.com pages. In this role, I was responsible for: • Setting the technical direction and working with the team to decide on a technical approach for all major web engineering initiatives. • Leading the initiative to fully re-platform Asana.com and ensure a modern and performant stack and platform for the site. This included a migration from PHP and vanilla JavaScript to Next.js, a migration from in-codebase data to a headless CMS, and a migration from AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Fastly to Netlify. All of this was done while keeping Asana.com fully operational for all users at all times. • Collaborating with design to create and establish patterns for a new brand design system, which included fully-tested and reusable React components, CSS-in-JS, connecting our Storybook instance to our headless CMS for real-time data previewing, and establishing ready-to-use page templates for our content authors. • Improving and adding functionality to the top-of-the-funnel flows wherein the Asana.com site and the Asana app communicate, so as to create a seamless user experience. ### Software Engineer II @ Gap Inc. Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area I co-led the team responsible for launching the effort to rearchitect the Gap Inc. cross-brand shopping bag page using React and Node-based microservices. This role included: • Building a new React application for the shopping bag page from scratch. • Building a Node-based API to act as an intermediary between our legacy backend service and our UI and to insulate the UI from the frequent changes being made to the backend service. • Working to follow best unit, integration, and contract testing practices. ### Software Engineer @ Gap Inc. Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area I worked with a variety of frameworks, libraries, languages, and tools, including ReactJS and NodeJS, to modernize and improve Gap Inc.'s category and product detail pages, which are used by all five Gap Inc. speciality brands. I also collaborated with business, UX, and third-party vendors to deliver a functional and enjoyable user experience. My team's biggest project was a year-long initiative to completely rearchitect and rebuild the category and product pages in React so that they would be scalable and performant. This included: • Incorporating framework-agnostic, robust design patterns into the architecture of our application. • Launching a company-wide library of over 100 versioned, reusable, and independently installable UI components and building user interfaces from the ground up using those components. • Building and implementing an in-house state management tool to allow our UI components to communicate with each other. • Decomposing our Java-based monolith into Node-based microservices. • Ensuring that all our code met accessibility and testing standards. This project was ultimately the most successful technical project in the company's history: • Increased revenue per visit by 5-7%. • Increased annualized revenue by $280 million. • Reduced load time by 50% over Black Friday. I also worked on launching the Hill City website when Gap Inc. acquired Hill City and on building the UI for Old Navy's Buy Online, Pickup in Store feature when it launched. ### Graduate Assistant @ Mills College Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | Oakland, CA As a TA for the spring 2017 Programming Languages course, the spring 2016 Computer Networks course, and the fall 2015 Interdisciplinary Research Methods Course, I worked closely with faculty to grade classwork and homework, hold office hours, and provide detailed feedback to students on their work. Additionally, I've worked with faculty and other students as a developer on a Ruby on Rails startup project. ### Software Development Engineer Intern @ Gap Inc. Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco, CA I worked with Gap Inc.'s responsive webpage team to improve and maintain a fast, cross-platform, cross-breakpoint site. Using multiple JavaScript frameworks (including Node.JS, Handlebars.JS, and Knockout.JS), HTML, and SCSS, I developed and implemented webpage performance improvement solutions and corrected user- and internally-reported webpage defects. Additionally, I created and developed unit, integration, and end-to-end tests using various JavaScript testing frameworks (including Jasmine, PhantomJS, Protractor, and Wraith). I worked in an Agile, test-driven development environment and multiple stories of mine were in production by the end of the summer. I also worked with a team of other interns to create an image optimizer tool for Gap Inc.'s Web Content Development team, which allows WCD developers to improve web page performance by batch optimizing a page's image content. ### Curriculum Developer and Instructor @ Digital Media Academy Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 As a curriculum developer, I developed and created online courses in Java and Python for teens. As an instructor, I taught Introduction to Programming with Java, Java for App and Game Development, and Introduction to Game Programming with Python to groups of fifteen to twenty teenagers at Stanford University. I also worked with DMA's Made By Girls program by instructing girls-only programming courses and helping to bring in outside female mentors currently working in tech. ### Academic Mentor @ Moving Forward Education Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 I managed a caseload of 8th grade students at The Girls' Middle School in Palo Alto, California, by tutoring them in mathematics, humanities, computer programming, and science, and by acting as a social and emotional mentor. I also designed and implemented weekly workshops to prepare students for high school academic writing and high school entrance exams. ## Education ### Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in English Language and Literature/Letters Scripps College Jan 2010 – Jan 2014 ### Master of Arts (M.A.) in Interdisciplinary Computer Science Mills College Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/cait-powell - GitHub: https://github.com/cepowell - Website: https://cepowell.github.io/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/cait JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/cait/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22