Dan Isaza
Verified Expert in Engineering
APIs Developer
Seattle, WA, United States
Toptal member since September 3, 2020
Dan is a full-stack product engineer and engineering leader. He's also a former startup founder. With a math and computer science degree from Stanford University, he has led remote engineering teams and thrives in high-ownership environments. He's driven by impact and likes to discuss business-level problems to develop a strong understanding of the business domain before implementing technical solutions. Dan believes that shipping iteratively is a strong predictor of project success.
Portfolio
Experience
- APIs - 8 years
- JavaScript - 8 years
- Python - 8 years
- React - 8 years
- Scripting - 7 years
- Django - 6 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 5 years
- Docker - 5 years
Work Experience
Senior Full-stack Engineer
BetterOmics
- Took part in a small team of three engineers to build a lab inventory management system from the ground up using Python and React.
- Built a spreadsheet-style UI and the supporting back end to enable users to enter large volumes of lab experiment data quickly.
- Worked under the supervision of highly seasoned, long-time senior engineering executives from Google.
VP of Engineering
Clever Real Estate
- Architected and developed the back-end system that introduces all customers to real estate agents. This drastically reduced the time needed to work with each customer and more than tripled our sales capacity.
- Hired, onboarded, and managed the engineering team. Owned the engineering roadmap and worked with product stakeholders to plan the team's work.
- Rebuilt the company's legacy WordPress website in Gatsby. This drastically sped up the site. Traffic to the site grew 5x in the year after the transition.
Product (Freelance)
Orbital Insight
- Developed and documented a process for collecting/geocoding locations of interest involved in the global construction supply chain. Many other freelancers then used this process to build out a dataset that the company used to build a new offering.
- Communicated regularly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Provided weekly updates on progress, including descriptions of challenges that the team of data-collectors may face when implementing the data collection process.
Full-stack Engineer (Freelance)
Emburse
- Refactored the permissions system for making and approving financial transactions.
- Wrote extensive automated tests to protect against future bugs.
- Overhauled the front-end user experience for managing permissions, with a focus on simplicity and ease of use.
Product Engineer
GigsterHQ
- Updated the company's payments infrastructure, saving them over $100,000 per year in transaction fees. This also streamlined the payments process and drastically reduced the time required to pay freelancers. (Integrated with the Payoneer API).
- Unblocked over $10 million in sales pipeline as the interim security point-of-contact. This involved describing the company's security posture to prospective customers and proposing the technology team's security roadmap.
- Heavily contributed to the internal platform that was used to manage the company's active projects with over 600 freelancers.
Product (Internship)
Palantir
- Ran multivariate tests on an email list of millions of small business owners to reduce churn in the customer base of one of the US's largest financial services firms.
- This included designing and executing experiments.
- Wrote Python scripts and SQL queries to analyze customer churn data from millions of small businesses across the country. The goal was to understand campaign performance in reducing churn.
- Performed cohort analysis for merchants going through email marketing campaigns.
Co-Founder: Fulfillment/Campaign Management
NeoReach
- Directly managed campaigns for our largest advertising clients.
- Led the four-person campaign management team that was in charge of ensuring smooth client outcomes for all projects.
- Developed statistical models to predict our future capacity and inform our sales process.
- Developed statistical models for predicting clicks on influencer endorsements, boosting our margins.
- Conducted over 200 hours of user interviews and participated in sales.
Project History
Mechanical Pen Plotter Utilities for Enthusiasts
https://github.com/PlotterClub/penplotPlaygroundThe code allows users to generate SVG files that will be drawn on the machine.
I wrote a line-deduplication algorithm that decreased plotting times by 96%. Drawings that previously took over four hours to print now take only 10 minutes.
Education
Bachelor of Science Degree in Math and Computer Science
Stanford University - Palo Alto, CA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Django ORM, React, Node.js, Twilio API, REST APIs, React Redux, React Redux Form, Google Maps API, Google Sheets API, Google API, Google Maps API (GeoJSON), Google Geocoding API, Pandas, NumPy, Scikit-learn
Tools
Google Sheets, Celery, HubSpot COS, Microsoft Excel, FullStory, Sentry, NGINX, Flow, Git, GitHub, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Zapier, Docker Compose, Mongoose, Geocoding, Webpack
Languages
JavaScript, Python, Python 2, Python 3, TypeScript, CSS3, CSS, HTML, HTML5, GraphQL, SQL, CoffeeScript, ECMAScript (ES6), Java, R
Frameworks
Django, Next.js, Material UI, Express.js, Django REST Framework, Tailwind CSS, Jinja, Angular, AngularJS, OAuth 2, Redux, Cypress, Flux
Paradigms
Testing, Unit Testing, Agile Project Management, Test-driven Development (TDD), ETL, B2B, Microservices, Automation, Test Automation, API Architecture
Platforms
Twilio, Unix, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, New Relic, Linux, Amazon EC2, Heroku, Mapbox, HubSpot, AWS IoT
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), PostgreSQL, PostGIS, MySQL, MongoDB, mLab, SQLite
Industry Expertise
Project Management
Other
APIs, People Management, Task Scheduling, Task Automation, Task Management, Leadership, Project Leadership, Scripting, Analysis, Code Review, Source Code Review, API Documentation, Documentation, Full-stack, Engineering Management, Web Development, Architecture, Back-end, Software Development Management, Engineering, Cloud Architecture, Design Systems, SaaS, CTO, Team Management, AWS Cloud Architecture, Technical Architecture, Authentication, Full-stack Development, Workday, Bandwidth APIs, SMS, SMS Bots, Team Leadership, Technical Leadership, Email, Email Marketing, A/B Testing, Product Strategy, Analytics, Streaming Data, Containers, Containerization, Storybook, Human Capital Management, Delivery Management, Data Scraping, Web Scraping, Intranets, Serverless, Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Computational Statistics, Data Science, Gatsby, Web Project Management, Scope Management, Online Payments, Payment APIs, Payment Security, GeoJSON, Drip Email, Multivariate Testing, Multivariate Statistical Modeling, Product Analytics, Cohort Analysis, Experimental Design, Software Architecture, Database Schema Design, Framer X, Framer, Framer Prototyping, Enzyme, OpenAI GPT-4 API, OpenAI GPT-3 API
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