# Monica Gallegos > Senior Software Engineer at Wavvest Location: Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/monicagallegos Staff Software Engineer with 13+ years of experience delivering full-stack web and mobile products. In recent years I’ve focused on backend financial systems. Specifically money movement, ledger correctness, reconciliation, and failure recovery. This meant working on balance calculations, historical data repair, and automating workflows previously handled manually. A significant part involved identifying and implementing logic to correctly model and handle the many ways financial transactions can fail or partially fail, ensuring funds do not get stuck in ambiguous or incorrect states. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Wavvest Jan 2026 – Present ### Staff Software Engineer @ Ellevest Jan 2019 – Jan 2025 Ellevest helps women build and manage their wealth through goal-based investing, financial planning, and wealth management. - Owned and expanded core money-movement ledgering logic, identifying gaps where legitimate financial activity was not being represented in balance calculations. - Corrected long-standing incorrect money movement in production by reconciling historical data and repairing transactions in a controlled, auditable manner. - Expanded backend logic to account for a much broader range of failure and partial-failure states across money-movement workflows (ACH, rollovers, withdrawals, deposits). - Prevented funds from becoming stuck in unhappy paths by introducing clear terminal and retryable states with deterministic outcomes. - Partnered with Product and Operations to identify systemic failure patterns, not just individual bugs, and implemented durable fixes. - Integrated security and review workflows to protect against fraud and ensure ongoing compliance. - Designed and implemented recurring billing systems for membership fees, including pricing changes, cadence updates, promotions, and ACH failure handling. ### Senior Software Developer @ Swell Investing LLC Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Greater Los Angeles Area Swell is an impact investing platform that helps users invest in high-growth companies that address environmental and social challenges. - Collaborated with the design and product teams to identify, estimate, deliver, and review features for both the web and iOS applications. This included funding source setup for multiple accounts, adding company exclusions, setting recurring investments, handling withdrawals, showing pending transactions, and expanding account pages with portfolio information. - Contributed to decoupling the React web client from the backend Rails server. - Spearheaded the inclusion of snapshot testing into the web development workflow with Percy. - Improved data flexibility, error handling, and test coverage within the iOS application. ### Senior Software Developer @ Freelance Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | Culver City, CA Co-founded a freelance outfit with designer and product strategist Jefferson Stewart. Worked with companies to tackle their digital application challenges. Projects included: - Enhancing the Starbucks E-Commerce website https://historias.starbucks.com/en-es/press/2022/starbucks-coffee-at-home-website-launches-e-commerce-sales-in-brazil/ - Advancing Kinetic's client application to production https://kineticcomp.com/ - Creating the MVP for Menagerie https://medium.com/matter-driven-narrative/redefining-wedding-planning-with-menagerie-e4ab723c76e3 ### Senior Software Developer @ MotiveMetrics Jan 2012 – Jan 2015 | Palo Alto, California MotiveMetrics is a motivation analysis application powered by over 60 years of psychology research and machine learning to reveal the motivations of any group of people. It is marked by its proven success in real world environments with Fortune 500 companies and brand leaders to deliver results as high as 10X ROI. As a developer at MotiveMetrics I worked with a small team of experts across psychology, sales, design, and engineering to synthesize the company's flagship application. - Contributed ideas and feedback to product discussions regarding direction and requirements - Responsible for all client application web development for first two years at MotiveMetrics - Organized and matured application's architecture as product and company grew - Structured application’s models and influenced design of API response objects - Researched and lead application's segment management and presentation in Segment Library - Drove segment identification with public data via integration with Twitter Search API to query and present segments reflective of the customer's search inputs - Facilitated regex-based search across thousands of segments, and established filtering and sorting with segment type and time - Delivered downloadable segment report as pdf with server-side rendering - Designed and developed segment similarity tool for research department - Produced an email tool for sales team to engage leads with dynamically generated charts from MotiveMetrics - Spearheaded strategy and design of segment curation using data from Twitter Lists - Tackled challenges to present segment data and reports in clear and understandable formats - Devised interactive data visualization that presented multiple segments across a spectrum - Created dynamic data table that utilized hue and saturation to emphasize positive and negative segment correlations ### Game Developer @ CloudKid Studios Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 Developer for PBS product LunchLabs. Mobile and web-based. ## Education ### Bachelor's degree in Computer Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology Jan 2007 – Jan 2012 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/monimoni --- Source: https://flows.cv/monicagallegos JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/monicagallegos/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-23