# Nikhil Patel > swe @ Whatnot | 2022 Kleiner Perkins Fellow | prev @ Stripe | Presidential Scholar @ USC Location: San Mateo, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/nikhilpatel1 Through prior work experience at both large companies and startups, I've discovered that I enjoy working in highly collaborative environments. In my free time, I volunteer in STEM education and am a freelance DJ. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Whatnot Jan 2024 – Present | New York City Metropolitan Area ### Software Engineer Intern @ Stripe Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 | Seattle, Washington, United States Intern on the disputes (chargebacks) automation team. - Independently scoped, developed and deployed fullstack feature to save and autofill commonly uploaded files optimizing the evidence submission and resolution process for payment disputes saving merchants an estimated $7M/year. Worked with PM to refine user flows. Created dashboard to track success metrics, wrote release documents, identified future enhancements. - Created new runbooks and led workshop on API/frontend changes. Reviewed PRs as team code owner. Updated internal company-wide frontend documentation. Joined on call rotation, drove incident remediation and presented in org-wide operations review. ### Engineering Fellow @ Kleiner Perkins Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 KP Engineering Fellow in 2022 cohort. ### President (USC Startup Club) @ LavaLab Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 President of USC's premier student-run startup incubator. - Closely mentored 14 startups, helping with everything from ideation and business model evaluation to technical implementation help. Boosted rate of continuation after incubator by 200%. - Shifted focus of incubator away from college and retail-focused consumer products and towards more scalable B2B Saas products. - Collaborated with industry leaders from Stripe, First Round Capital, Whatnot, and Techstars to offer workshops and fireside chats through which many members got internships/job offers. - Significantly increased gender parity, especially for developers (to over 50%). - Fundraised over $16k for Demo Night, seed money for startups leaving the incubator, and internal events. ### Director Of Development @ LavaLab Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 Director of SWE for USC startup incubator. Taught club members essential soft and hard skills for full-stack, ML, and blockchain startup ideas. Mentored multiple teams through brainstorming, need-finding, user research, pitching, and developing MVPs for their startups. ### Software Developer (Telescope) @ LavaLab Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Los Angeles, California, United States Created Telescope, a React Native app with Firebase backend. Work on a team of four co-founders, responsible for planning, development, and presenting product at pitch event. Telescope is a digital community for creators to network, gain portfolio feedback, and connect with prospective employers. Won Audience Choice Award at pitch event. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Stripe Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | Seattle, Washington, United States - Created cron jobs in Ruby to catch chargeback evidence submission errors that previously caused Stripe over $300K in ops loss. Updaters monitor 90+% of disputes traffic (Amex, Mastercard, Visa). Built detectors and alerts with Terraform to notify runner of card network partner outages. Identified ~850 stuck disputes in the past month. - Led remediation for minor incidents. Helped team with KTLO (40% of higher priority run tickets) including SOX compliance. - Proposed a new feature for credit reporting on Stripe Subscriptions for Intern Hackathon, placed 3rd. ### Melady Lab Undergraduate Research Fellow @ University of Southern California Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 - Developed iOS app for doctors at the USC Keck hospital to collect images and data on burn victims using Swift and Firebase Realtime DB. - Created a standard benchmark for time series classification algorithms using real-world datasets, and assessed the performance of common deep neural networks to evaluate performance. https://nikp29.github.io/time-series-benchmarks/ ### Machine Learning and Data Analytics Intern @ Tribute Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | San Mateo, CA, United States Tribute is a video technology company that enables people to share appreciation on special occasions. - Delivered production capabilities to make video editing workflow 5x faster; built ASR (Automated Speech Recognition) pipelines to detect and trim silences from user videos. Utilized ffmpeg and sox for audio and video processing, AWS for transcription and storage, and Celery task queue and Heroku to spin up performance dynos to prevent bottlenecking. - Proposed, designed, and released a new feature to automate creation of “video walls” i.e. clips of users saying key phrases such as “happy birthday” in sync. ### Data Science Lab Undergraduate Research Fellow @ University of Southern California Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 Evaluated performance and storage usage of Temporal Convolutional networks and LSTMs for memory access prediction, in order to develop a compact machine learning-driven cache prefetcher. ### Full Stack Engineering Intern @ Cadence Work (A Y Combinator Startup) Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area Cadence is a tool that eliminates the need for time-intensive daily status and standup meetings. - Developed key features and solved critical bugs for a team productivity tracker that replaces standup meetings. - Conceived of, designed, and implemented new features to increase interactivity and user engagement, such as a weekly check-in interface to determine team wellbeing, strengths, and weaknesses. - Overhauled notification system and implemented basic i18n. Refactored Python back-end Slack integration to optimized database access, reduced database calls by 50%. - Established Scrum practices, and instilled new pull request models and methods for repository organization to improve readability and organization of code base. Used Typescript, ReactJS, and Go. ### Machine Learning Intern @ Arity Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Arity collects user driving data and uses machine learning to detect unsafe driving behaviors. - Developed and trained clustering algorithms on user driving data to identify points-of-interest using specialized clustering algorithms like OPTICS. Wrote user trip data cleaning pipeline that accounted for lost and dropped connections and enabled better understanding of end-to-end user trips. Pipeline was adopted company-wide. ### Front-end Engineering / Data Analyst Intern @ Avail Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Avail is a peer-to-peer car-sharing platform. - Avail is a peer-to-peer car service. Optimized customer matching algorithms using dynamic programming and created machine learning models to predict demand. Built features for the Avail webapp such as a trip date-picker and an insurance policy generator that determines the optimal policy for a user’s trip. ### Architectural Intern @ Cloud Arch Studio Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area - Collaborated with Stanford University faculty, and students to develop designs for affordable housing solutions primarily for East Palo Alto, and for CORE project to bring vital resources to Indian slums. - Included case study development, delivered mock-ups of potential sites, and designs for interventions. Designed modular panelized systems for Accessory Dwelling Units, and independent structures. - Used Revit, SketchUp, SolidWorks, Enscape, and evaluated proprietary virtual reality technology to visualize various projects. ## Education ### BS in Computer Science University of Southern California ### The Nueva School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/patel-nikhil --- Source: https://flows.cv/nikhilpatel1 JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/nikhilpatel1/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-11