# Nick Retallack > Full-Stack Engineer Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/nickretallack I'm a programming language nerd and I've used a lot of languages. I make a lot of web apps, full stack, including isomorphic server-side rendering and interactive SVG or 3D visualizations. My top concern is always making a great product with a convenient UX while managing tech debt to keep development agile. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Product Hunt Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco, California, United States * Revamped the Golden Kitties awards and the launch archive leaderboard pages, making them much more of a highlight of the site. * Ran A/B tests to ship visual changes while understanding their effect on user behavior. * Fixed some graphql cache consistency issues and added optimistic updates. * Improved the site's responsive layout ### Senior Software Engineer @ Tandem Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Cupertino, California, United States * Created an interactive product demo and designed and animated a mascot for it. * Reworked in-call widgets to eliminate concurrency issues such as race conditions. * Introduced storybook-based visual testing for all UI elements. * Added TypeScript types to all inter-process communication messages and browser APIs. * Implemented the remote desktop feature. * Created a system for mentioning user names and room names in chat messages. * Polished the UI and eliminated jitter. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Cruise Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco, California, United States * My team built web-based tools to label data from autonomous vehicles. This includes 2D camera images and 3D lidar data, and it can project information from one space to the other. It uses our open source library, regl-worldview. * Lead a year-long initiative to transform our individual labeling tools into a rich, intuitive experience that produces linked data across all sensors. * Delivered image segmentation capability to the labeling tool as an end to end project. My work was used as a shining example for other engineers. I worked directly with our designer on the UX. * Received an award for greatly improving the quality of life for our developers by identifying and removing tech debt left behind by previous initiatives. * Converted our entire frontend code base from flow types to typescript. * Refactored our tool's frontend state and actions to allow labelers to undo their actions in the labeling tool without causing memory leaks. * Prevented a planned full rewrite of our server code by pitching a better alternative: using hooks to customize existing behavior without sacrificing consistency of behavior. * Rated "exceeds expectations" with regard to my technical contributions. ### Software Engineer @ Gfycat Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Palo Alto, California, United States * Made significant contributions to the Facebook Messenger bot and GMail extension. * Found holistic solutions to the challenges of building a universal single-page web app with server-side rendering, authentication, and CDN full-page caching. * Worked with our designer to implement a full UI overhaul for the destination site while porting major features from Angular to React. ### Software Engineer @ SMCI at Google Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | Mountain View, California, United States * Developed a matchmaking application for the Engineering Residency Program that saved 90 man hours per year helping incoming interns convert to teams. * Improved performance 10x on Google Course Builder and the CS Education Application Portal by serving more content statically and reducing SQL and GQL database queries. * Made numerous usability improvements to Google Course Builder including a major re-skin of the app and its navigation. ### Software Engineer @ ThinAir Labs LLC Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | Mountain View, California, United States * Built an awesome prototype which won the Demo God award at DEMO Enterprise convention. * Built a pub/sub system in Go to synchronize encrypted filesystems between computers, backed by a PostgreSQL database. * Built a friendly web interface in Python/Flask for configuring data security policies. * Added a text messaging and phone call interface as well as mobile app notifications. * Built an API for mobile and desktop applications with documentation in Swagger. ### Software Engineer @ Bitcasa Jan 2011 – Jan 2013 | Mountain View, California, United States * Built a single-page application in AngularJS that allowed thousands of users to browse and organize their files online. * Added on-demand video transcoding and document conversion so you can preview your files on any device. * Worked closely with various designers through multiple complete UI redesigns including responsive mobile layouts. ### Software Engineer @ meebo Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 | Mountain View, CA I improved our internal tools for scheduling and trafficking advertisements as well as analyzing their success. We made heavy use of couchdb in all our products. ### Software Engineer - Business Intelligence @ Playdom Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 | Mountain View, CA I improved our internal tools for analyzing user behavior in games and alerting when bugs were encountered. ### Software Engineer @ Joint Enterprise Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 | Santa Cruz, CA I prototyped a social network. ### Computer Programmer @ GOHANLON LLC Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 Built interactive websites for clients such as Shane & Peter and Fastpencil.com using Ruby on Rails. ### Computer Science Tutor @ University of California Jan 2006 – Jan 2008 I ran study sessions for Intro to Computer Science: Data Structures ### JavaScript Programmer Intern @ AOL Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 * I made widgets for my.aol.com including a web-based implementation of AOL Instant Messenger. * I showed the team how we could use closures to isolate the code for individual widgets. ## Education ### BS in Computer Science University of California, Santa Cruz ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nickretallack - Portfolio: http://nickretallack.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/nickretallack JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/nickretallack/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-30