# Dan Federman > Founding mobile engineer at Portola Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/danfederman ## Work Experience ### Founding Engineer @ Portola Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco, CA - Founding mobile engineer, running a growing team (five strong at the time of writing) that ships an average of three times a week - Designed and built the first 3D embodied AI companion on iOS that communicates in realtime over both voice and text - Responsible for application architecture, development velocity, quality, and more - Designed our mobile interview loop, yielding strong signal while evaluating candidates' utilization of AI ### iOS Technical Lead @ Tempo Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco, California, United States - iOS Platform technical lead of eight engineers, reporting to Director of Engineering. - Responsible for scoping, planning, and delegating the creation of new features and platform improvements. ### Software Engineer @ Airbnb Jan 2017 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area - Joined Airbnb’s Tech Council in July 2020. Spearheaded effort to standardize routing across clients. - Identified the need to re-architect more than one million lines of code in Airbnb’s iOS app, acquired the necessary resources, designed the new architecture, and co-led the transformation of the iOS codebase over nearly four years. - Built a code parsing and generation system that increased code consistency and developer productivity. - Introduced code ownership to Airbnb, and built automated code quality and production alerting atop it. - Technical lead for client-side development on Airbnb’s Messaging team for 15 months. ### Software Engineer @ Present Company Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area - Built a chat-based social networking iOS app from the ground up with dependency injected, protocol-driven, and unit testable architecture. Written in Swift. - Joined a 3-person founding team as the first engineering hire. - Led multiple contract developers. ### Software Engineer @ Cash App Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco - Developed the Cash App for iOS on a two-to-four-person team from v1.0 onward. - Led iOS development for three major feature releases while team lead was on paternity leave. - Drove Siri and Messages integration – Apple showcased both features in the 2016 WWDC keynote. - Implemented Nearby, utilizing Bluetooth Low Energy to securely discover Cash customers within 250 feet. - Re-architected app to enable code sharing, better testing, and improved build times. - Redesigned model to reduce main thread usage to less than 1% of capacity on launch. - Review highlights: “[You] took ownership of numerous critical features,” “reliabl[ly got] the job done without loose ends … on time,” “carry difficult jobs over the finish line,” “[take] ownership of critical work and problem domains without being asked,” “[have] extraordinary enthusiasm and dedication,” “[are] the ultimate team player … [and] a model to the rest of the team,” “are strongly tuned in to customer feedback in every channel, and your teammates … depend on it.” ### Software Engineer @ Apple Inc. Jan 2011 – Jan 2013 - Enhanced the User Interface (UI) of Messages, FaceTime, and Photo Booth applications. Coded in Objective-C and dynamically generated HTML/CSS. - Re-architected the Messages transcript to cut rendering time in half and double scrolling performance, while reducing total lines of code by 75%. - Significantly reduced Messages’ power consumption when using animated buddy icons. - Redesigned file transfer interaction; redesigned copy/paste functionality. - Worked cross-functionally to integrate new frameworks into Messages without increasing the application's memory usage, and to add Emoji substitution and support to Messages. - Fifth most productive contributor to the Mavericks OS (of 250+ engineers) based on features completed and bugs fixed. - Review highlights: “[You] collaborate openly and constructively,” “[deliver] features… reliably on time and with high quality,” “prioritize your effort well,” “don’t let issues stagnate,” and “consistently take… vague feature idea and flesh out the non-obvious edge cases and consequences.” ### Software Engineer (Intern) @ Microsoft Corporation Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 - Worked within a multimillion line codebase to improve user interface (UI) for Messenger and Communicator for Mac. Coded in Objective-C, C++ and Objective-C++. - Proposed modifications to user experience that were incorporated into spec of future product release. - Review highlights: “smart, independent … great teammate”, “able to get things done … with impressive speed”, “always does homework before asking a question”, “very quick to grasp explanations”, “has many ideas of what can be done better from a customer prospective”, “polite and respectful of others’ opinions”, “contributed to spec review (and a lot – to the spec itself).” ### Recitation Leader and Head Teaching Assistant, Data Structures and Algorithms (Java) @ Columbia University Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 - Prepared lesson plans for and taught two weekly hour-long recitation sections; managed three graudate-student teaching assistants. ### Software Engineer (Intern) @ Apple Inc. Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 - Designed and implemented new UI and backend for OS Installer, simplifying the hardware failure recovery process and cutting recovery time in half. - Prototyped recently-released silent updater for malware definitions. - Collaborated on the design of a new user experience for a future OS (details subject to NDA). ### Teaching Assistant, Advanced Programming (C/C++) @ Columbia University Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 ### Software Engineer (Intern) @ NASA Ames Research Center Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 - Received 2008 NASA Ames Honor Award – awarded to top student intern each year. - Assisted development of next-generation Mission Control software, written in Java, for use at Johnson Space Center. ### Software/Quality Assurance Engineer (Intern) @ NASA Ames Research Center Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 - Developed and tested web-based Virtual Network Computing software, written in Java, for use by NASA engineers and Mission Control. ## Education ### BS in Computer Science, Systems Columbia Engineering ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dsfed --- Source: https://flows.cv/danfederman JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/danfederman/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05