View the extended version of this resume online at resume.arenpatel.com
Summary
Player-coach engineering leader with a YC acquisition under my belt — BufferBox, acquired by Google while I was still a student — and a track record of rescuing chaotic codebases and building high-performing engineering cultures at early-stage companies. Currently Head of Engineering at Pallet, leading ~20 engineers building AI automation for logistics. I'm drawn to the early innings: the messier the system, the more satisfying the fix.
TypeScript · Go · Ruby · Dart · Python · gRPC · SQL · Redis · GCP · AWS
Work History
Head of Engineering Pallet
August 2024 - Present
- Built and manage a team of ~20 engineers, personally involved in hiring each one
- Architected a distributed agent delivery platform for orchestrating AI agents across large-scale logistics workflows
- Established engineering culture emphasizing rapid iteration, collaborative ownership, and accountability; team operates fully in-person
- Contributed to the divestiture of Pallet's original TMS product — now Tenet OS — to a private equity firm
Founding Software Engineer / Principal Finch (YC S20)
July 2021 - August 2024
- Built Finch's core platform from scratch — services, async job scheduling, and a feature-flagging rollout system
- Shipped the developer onboarding experience, automating sign-ups and product configuration end-to-end
- Established observability and quality culture across Engineering using Sentry, DataDog, and integrated test patterns
- Led security and compliance: access auditing, JWT token hardening, GDPR policies, and legal terms
- Grew the engineering team from 2 to 25; mentored engineers at every level as the org scaled
Staff Software Engineer (L6) Google / Area 120 / Orion Wi-Fi
August 2019 - July 2021
- Orion Wi-Fi is a team within Area 120, Google's in-house incubator
- Developed Angular (Dart and TypeScript) web apps for enrolling Wi-Fi supply and demand
- Designed & developed gRPC/Protobuf/HTTP interfaces for consumption by first and third party client applications
- Go, Dart, Angular, Typescript, gRPC, Protobuf, AppEngine, GCP, Firebase, OAuth, etc.
- TL for the Nest to Google account migration and the My Account GDPR data export tool
- Authored and presented the Nest Cam & TensorFlow Codelab at Google I/O 2017 — a Python/Flask app that pulled live Nest Cam snapshots via the Works with Nest API and classified them in real-time using TensorFlow's Inception-v3 model
- Built Works With Nest and the Nest Developers OAuth platform — APIs, services, and UI/UX
- Introduced Docker and Kubernetes to Nest's Web Engineering team
Go · Ruby on Rails · Ember.js · TypeScript · MySQL · Redis · AWS · GCP · Git · nginx · Kubernetes · OAuth · SAML · JWTs
- Managed technical aspects of retailers' BufferBox REST API integrations
- Created sales collateral using Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign
- Produced product demos and presentations for prospective partners
- Responsible for design and development of all BufferBox web services and APIs
- Ruby on Rails, Python, Flask, MySQL, Redis, AWS, Heroku, DelayedJob, Clockwork, Git, Mailgun etc
- Initial software released at Y Combinator's Summer 2012 Demo Day; subsequently named to TechCrunch's Top 10 Startups
- Acquired by Google - supported migration and integration with Google's technologies (rewrite in Go for AppEngine)
Education
Bachelor of Applied Science, Honours Electrical Engineering, University of Waterloo
Software Development · Artificial Intelligence · Communications & Network Security · Cryptography
Fourth Year Design Project Unlockly
Personal Projects
txtshr
- A secure, zero-knowledge text-sharing tool — the server never sees your text or passphrase
- CLI encrypts text locally with AES-256-GCM (key derived via PBKDF2-SHA256, 600k iterations) and produces a shareable URL; the recipient decrypts entirely in-browser via the Web Crypto API
-
Encrypted payload lives in the URL fragment (
#), which browsers never transmit to the server per RFC 3986 - Supports custom ES-module renderers (Markdown, code highlighting, charts, etc.)
-
Installable via
brew install aren55555/tap/txtshr
#WeeklyBangers
- Extracts Tweets from Twitter
- Transforms the tweets with #weeklybanger augmenting them with music metadata (song title, artist, etc)
- Loads a fully client side static HTML/CSS/JS page that is automatically re-deployed to my server host
App/API Version to GitHub
- Chrome extension that detects version identifiers (like git commit SHAs) on web pages and creates one-click links to view that commit on GitHub
- Works with JSON endpoints (API health checks, status pages) and HTML pages with version info in meta tags
- Useful for debugging production issues, verifying deployments, and incident response
- Features flexible URL pattern matching, settings sync across browsers, and team config sharing via export/import
github.com/google/jsonapi
- Open sourced a Go library for serializing/deserializing JSON payload following the for the JSON API format
- This project helped develop my familiarity with reading and understanding specifications/RFCs (JSON API v1.0, ISO8601, RFC 2119, etc.)
- Currated issues/bugs and reviewed pull requests from public contributors
- Authored library documentation, godoc reference documentation and new feature proposals (#80)
- Was used to build the Go backend for Works With Nest; also used in a variety of third party projects
- Reached approximately 1400+ stars on GitHub
Custom designed by Aren Patel