# Pierre Ortega

> Senior Software Engineer @ Synthesis | Typescript

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/pierreortega

a hacker that breaks into things for purely intellectual curiosity

## Work Experience
### Senior Software Engineer @ Synthesis
Jan 2021 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area
joined as an indendepent contractor for frontend work, wore many hats, including managing game servers infrastructure deployed to k8s/agones. did a lot of product work on both Synthesis products: Teams and Tutor

Tutor
* on-device speech system tailored for kids, with respecting privacy and correcting common mispells for 5-9yo kids 
* AI Harness to leverage existing lesson content through conversational AI for new unexplored content such as geometry, including a openclaw inspired 2 layer student memory system
* wrote the Content API layer that transforms content into interactive lessons with TTS and  
* owned monorepo + pnpm migration, auth system, and PostHog analytics integration

Teams
* built the iPad app with in-app purchases (StoreKit + Apple webhooks) and a native bridge layer. went through many reviews round with Apple as we're leading with an app for kids with microphone/camera.
* game servers were on a single heroku server and couldn't keep up with growth. Led the migration to multi-cluster Kubernetes/Agones, with automated scaling capacity from 500 to 10,000 customers
* achieved 60% reduction in infrastructure costs through automated scaling scripts, fleet cleanup, and CI/CD optimization
* built a game (!!!) with our team. responsible for the state sync layer with the server, and building the game loop on the server using immer for immutability

best memory is receiving a whisky bottle after solving a mysql timeout connection when running on lambdas (yuuk)

### Senior Software Engineer @ Data Theorem
Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Palo Alto, CA
part of the team that built API Secure: Data Theorem's API security product that discovers, tests, and protects APIs across multi-cloud environments.

the product went on to be used by enterprise customers covering 2.8 billion end users, including Cisco Duo, Zoom, Zendesk, Coinbase, DocuSign, PlayStation, and 5 of the top 7 largest banks

* we needed to find every API a customer had without requiring any agents or config on their side. worked on the blackbox discovery engine that scanned across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem, consolidating APIs from gateways like Apigee and Kong into a single inventory
* collaborated with security researchers to translate real API attack patterns (auth bypasses, broken authorization, encryption gaps, bot abuse) into automated scanner engines in Python. covered SAST, DAST, and SCA methodologies across REST, GraphQL, and SOAP endpoints, contributing to the 200+ attack signals the product monitors
* built frontend surfaces for the security posture dashboard: compliance scoring, authorization strength, TLS status, and zombie API detection.

### Software Engineer @ Super Evil Megacorp
Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Mateo, Ca
LiveOps Tools.

• Collaborated with team members on the creation, improvisation, and implementation of various liveops tools that enables customer support to solve their problems faster and allowing the development team to stay focused on work without being interrupted.
• Built internal tools using Meteor, NodeJS, React, Blaze, MongoDB, AWS

Within six months of hire:
- Built a internal automation tool that reduced customer support flow when solving customer accounts issues
- Moved mostly internal tools to a docker environment, allowing easy spin up of tools for each environment
- Responsible for the creation of several batch job scripts that allows customer support to easily solve problems which were required manual work that could take over 10 hours to execute.


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/pierre-ortega

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Source: https://flows.cv/pierreortega
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/pierreortega/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-23