# Radha Shah > Staff Software Engineer @ Rightfoot | ex-Nextdoor Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/radha At Rightfoot, I bring my unicorn-scale experience (Nextdoor, Skillz) to lead technical strategy in a pre-PMF company's 0-1 journey. Most crucially, I led the team to build the company's first public API. I also drove $1.5M in cost savings, created an extensible transaction processing system covering major banks, including Chase, and developed BalanceIQ - a predictive balance calculation system that won the company hackathon. Through it all, I've scaled systems 2X and improved operational efficiency from hours to seconds while fostering a culture of engineering excellence. At Nextdoor, I was a full-stack engineer working in Python and React to create features for the real estate section. At Skillz, I primarily worked on creating Java microservices from a Groovy on Grails monolith. This involves planning, designing, coding, testing and deploying endpoints using a host of technologies such as Java, Spring Boot, AWS, MySQL etc. At Citi, I played a variety of software engineering roles at a financial services firm. Initially, I worked on the trading floor making VBA scripts for the traders and salespeople. I then supported the kdb processes for a Delta One Derivatives application, and created kdb-related features in C# and Java for various trading applications. Next, I helped code front-end features for a FX trading platform, before finding my home in the back-end - creating server-side features in various microservices related to currency pair trading. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Rightfoot Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States Architected a production-grade agentic AI system featuring fine-tuned models, LLM-as-judges, task evaluators, safety guardrails, and observability, expanding the platform toward universal coverage. • Increased coverage 20×, enabling a clear path toward 4,000+ future integrations • Developed fine-tuned OpenAI models with LangFuse traces to generate high-quality training data • Curated evaluation and golden datasets and built Kiln-based task-performance evaluators to benchmark fine-tuned vs. frontier models • Used LangFuse trace-level observability to support logging, debugging, and iterative refinement • Introduced safety guardrails, including risk detection heuristics, to ensure the agent operated within defined boundaries. * Designed prompt-engineered LLM-as-judge to score task outcomes per risk, generate confusion matrices, and systematically eliminate false negatives. • Redesigned the integration architecture to eliminate ~90% of per-integration code, dramatically simplifying large-scale onboarding ### Senior Software Engineer @ Rightfoot Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco, California, United States - Led design and implementation of Rightfoot Public API v1.0.0 delivering 83% ARR growth and 50% customer expansion, including securing the company's largest deal. - Drove $1.5M projected annual savings by self-initiated optimizations: 60% faster balance processing, combining API operations, and eliminating third-party services. - Architected an extensible transaction processing system supporting major financial institutions including Chase (22% of total transaction volume), enabling the company's first pre-PMF customer acquisition and establishing a new B2B revenue stream. - Won company-wide 2024 Hackathon with BalanceIQ, a full-stack PoC for predictive balance calculations to reduce NSF penalties driving 2024 product roadmap. - Scaled system throughput 2X by optimizing tokenizer chunking with 4x scale potential. - Architected batch completion through Stream Aggregators to resolve concurrency issues completing thousands of batches. - Automated batch results with a Retool 1-click CSV tool (1hr → 5s) and Slack-webhook notifications saving engineering hours and improving cross-team communication. - Prevented 17% data loss for unsupported institutions, resolving 31% of batch timeouts, reducing batch completion SLA from 60 to 5 minutes for affected batches - Enabled loan underwriting use cases by delivering Balance Errors v0 and v1. - Mentored engineers on ROI-focused technical decision-making, elevated quality through rigorous code/design reviews, CI/CD linting, extensive refactoring and modularization, resolved API inquiries in <24 hours boosting customer NPS by 40% ### Software Engineering Manager @ AnyRoad Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States - Led a team of nine to build full-stack features in React and Rails for an experience relationship management platform. - Conducted 1:1s and performance reviews; directed multiple promotions; fostered team unity through organized events - Estimated and communicated timelines of multi-quarter projects to stakeholders in collaboration with lead engineers. - Reviewed technical specs, conducted code reviews; fixed several bugs to not detract focus of the team. - Collaborated with product, design and engineering leadership on quarterly roadmap planning and bi-weekly sprint planning - Led evaluation and selection of a translation system to streamline developer/QA processes for new language adoption. ### Software Engineer IV @ AnyRoad Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area - Led and developed several technical initiatives including creating a CircleCi workflow to run Cypress end-to-end tests gating production releases and using Datadog Synthetics providing Slack uptime alerts for production/QA environments. - Coded full-stack features including a language dropdown translating an experience list into a chosen language and customized and specific error messaging for experience searches. - Extensively modernized repositories: added testing libraries, HTML parsers, commonized styles, linters and pre-commit hooks. Removed dead, deprecated code and libraries, centralized FullStory snippets, and upgraded to M1-compatible gems. ### Software Engineer III @ Nextdoor Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area - Led, planned and developed full-stack revenue-generating projects in React, Python, iOS and Android. - Architected high performing lead generation ads and previous A/B test iteration leading to expansion of customer base beyond real estate to all SMB and improved retention - Other features include Projects postbox for high quality DIY content, free/premium plans, and Opcity partnership - Contributor to several full-stack/mobile features including free trials, integrated post flow, home owner dashboard, Salesforce/datalake integration, vetting libraries such as Victory to graph ad metrics, and Listhub partnership. - Developed Android features like newsfeed ads, mobile specific designs and bug fixes. - Contributed to the development and success of a positive and productive team culture: - Participated in on-call and troubleshooted critical production issues. - Onboarded and mentored engineers, performed code reviews, conducted technical interviews - Leader and contributor to women’s and LGBT ERGs ### Software Engineer II @ Skillz Inc. Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 - Planned, designed, coded, tested, and deployed multiple endpoints for mobile gaming tournaments SDK using Java, SpringBoot, Hystrix, Caffeine, Spock, Docker and MySQL from Groovy on Grails legacy application for scalability. - Fixed bugs and optimized code related to cache invalidation, push notification bottlenecks, OAuth2 authentications. - Created Jenkins jobs to build client libraries and perform environment restarts, benchmarked AWS instance types, developed tailing shell scripts. - Participated in on-call rotation, ran Gatling stress tests and executed adhoc rgtequests - Conducted technical interviews, onboarded new engineers and mentored junior engineers ### Senior Software Engineer @ Citi Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Greater New York City Area - Developed and tested Java server-side features in an Agile environment for new sales-trader dashboard using Maven, Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Apache Camel DSL, JUnit and Stash/Git for version control. - Created electronic streaming trade booking flow in Java 8 through protocol buffer messaging and stored procedures for data storage. - Coded Java microservice requesting credit checks for clients by refactoring Camel routes. - Developed data access, transformation and caching for transaction cost analysis of algorithmic strategies via Java/kdb+ interface and Quartz - Coded automated post-release checkout of several orders through FitNesse integration tests written with Java fixtures. ### Software Developer II @ Citi Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | New York • Developed HTML5 POC of WPF algorithmic trading window, using Angular, ChartJS, NodeJS and CSS. • Coded and NUnit-tested C# API for new client picker search tool, fetching server results for GUI search queries. • Developed features for FX price monitoring web application using C#, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, Knockout, AmplifyJS and Bootstrap • Created Transact-SQL stored procedures in SQL SSMS to archive FX price spread predictions using triggers and common table expressions • Coded transaction limits bypass, liquidity pool selection and validation checks for orders via Excel using C#, WCF and RTD server. • Generated automated process of generating and sending a weekly price data report using SQL, VBScript and Task Scheduler. • Coded a contracted design of trading window using WPF and Snoop to save trader screen space following design specifications. ### Software Developer @ Citi Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Greater New York City Area • Designed, developed and tested a Java server-side API to kdb processes with Maven and Spring for a new High Touch application. • Interfaced with EMEA & NAM D1 sales traders to develop q script calculating WTD (week-to-date), MTD and YTD commissions daily. • Developed WPF interface to algorithmic trading strategy; implemented in C#, FIX tags sent to exchange via Tibco. • Coded and tested features for a Delta One Derivative trading application in C#, such as queries to ETF constituent data sources, a Tibco transport for lower latency index data queries, security validation prior to buying/selling portfolios and new FIX tags sent to exchange. • Coded in Java and kdb/q, basket decomposition for global sales system; re-factored kdb subscriptions for intra-day NAV calculations using q. • Troubleshooted real-time market critical issues for kdb processes for basket data analytics in D1 trading application using Autosys and kdb/q. ### Linux Help Desk Operator @ Rutgers University Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 | New Brunswick, NJ • Monitored server farm environment using Nagios, performed system backups and restores • Triaged and answered incoming email requests, provided technical support over the phone and in-person. ### Quality Assurance Automation Intern @ ALK Technologies Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Princeton, NJ • Automated extraction of full address information from >12,000 bugs using VBA regex expressions. • Performed regression, smoke and ad hoc tests for full software product line; wrote test cases into TestLink, logged defects through elementool. ### Software Developer Intern @ LegalCrunch Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Somerset, NJ Developed web front-end for People of Party, which presented a crowdsourced map of NYC nightlife using Google Maps API, Twitter widgets, HTML, CSS, jQuery and Ajax; developed a procedure to pre-populate user forms using MySQL, PHP and Ajax. ### Network Engineering Intern @ Comcast Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | Moorestown, NJ • Designed and developed a web application providing statistics on legal faxes using bash, MySQL, PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS and Git. • Assisted in installing VMWare and Sharepoint; imaged new servers with the latest build. ### Store Associate @ Welsh Farms Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 | Jamesburg, NJ Operate cash register during rush hour. Answer customer questions and resolve complaints. Restock shelves and keep inventory of stock. ## Education ### B.S. in Computer Science in B.A. in Psychology Rutgers University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/radshah --- Source: https://flows.cv/radha JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/radha/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01