# Josh Rai > Software Engineer at Quizlet Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/joshrai I'm a lifelong software developer. Writing beautiful code is a lifelong aspiration for me, but succeeding at that (if it ever happens) won't be enough for me to sleep well at night. For that, my work needs to be helping address what I see as a pressing problem of the world, or at least of my community -- such as providing access to education, health care, or economic opportunity to those who lack it. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Quizlet Jan 2015 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Principal Software Engineer @ NICE Systems (formerly Merced Systems) Jan 2010 – Jan 2015 Developed new features on top of Merced Performance Suite software (renamed NICE Performance Management after acquisition by NICE Systems). This software is an implementation of an OLAP calculation engine with reporting and other capabilities designed to help organizations understand and improve the performance of their large workforces (for example, organizations that employ thousands of customer service agents working in call centers, or field sales workers around the world). I gained familiarity with the software's Scheme/Java hybrid architecture to build on it, contributed to the team that helped transition it to a more standards-based platform, and was a member of the team that implemented a proof-of-concept redesign of the core calculation engine to be both more modular and more powerful (to support a broader set of use cases, such as large-scale batch processing, ad-hoc interactive reporting and potentially near-real-time calculations). Most recently I've worked on a team to develop an OSGi-based remote management application to simplify deployment of our multi-component software to a cluster. ### Extranet & Web Developer @ Taproot Foundation Jan 2005 – Jan 2010 The Taproot Foundation enables the delivery of pro bono consulting services to nonprofit organizations across the US, and partners with the corporate sector to institutionalize the pro bono ethic into that sector. It offers "service grants", rather than financial grants, to nonprofits, by assembling teams of consultants from the marketing, IT, HR and strategy management professions to complete six-month part-time pro bono consulting projects for them. My role is to develop the Internet-based tools used by staff, pro bono consultants and nonprofit clients to support these operations. We rely largely on in-house-developed software, but also interact with open-source software solutions and cloud services, to enable a unique system of CRM, grant management, recruitment, project management, reporting, and financial management. ### Software Developer @ Oodle Jan 2005 – Jan 2005 Oodle acts as a search engine for a vast variety of local and national online classified-ad websites. I wrote Perl scripts to crawl specific websites, parse their listings, and feed the data into Oodle's database. I also worked with product and marketing managers to define a web-based database of charity organizations that accept donations of various types of goods, and implemented the application in PHP. ### Software Developer (contractor) @ Johnson & Johnson Jan 2002 – Jan 2004 Through BabyCenter.com, which was acquired by J&J and took on a consulting capacity in web development for other J&J business units, I was the lead developer reimplementing the Johnson's Baby consumer products website (johnsonsbaby.com), working with their staff to craft a content management tool that they could use, and implementing it in Java and JHTML in the ATG Dynamo application framework. Also through BabyCenter, I was one of a small team of developers to implement Walmart.com's Baby Products area. ### Technical Manager and Software Developer @ BabyCenter.com Jan 1997 – Jan 2002 Worked with technical director to develop the prototype for, and launch, http://www.BabyCenter.com/, which quickly became the web's leading resource for new and expecting parents. Continued to develop internal tools for the company's editorial staff as well as public-facing features of the site. Was a lead team member in the development of the system driving BabyCenter's targeted, stage-based email newsletters and campaigns, which became a cornerstone of the business and an early model of email marketing, supporting millions of outbound emails per day to subscribers. Was technical lead for the development of the back-end systems supporting BabyCenter's online store, handling about 1000 orders per day. Did server-side development of websites and email systems for other Johnson & Johnson companies after J&J acquired BabyCenter. ### Software Developer @ I.Consulting Corporation Jan 1995 – Jan 1997 Worked as a software consultant for several companies. Helped develop a first-generation templating language for BroadVision to allow its customers to build custom web interfaces to its e-commerce system. Worked at Netscape to create some of the first demonstration applications for LiveWire, their server-side JavaScript-based application server. ## Education ### BA in Computer Science; Religious Studies Brown University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joshrai --- Source: https://flows.cv/joshrai JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/joshrai/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12