Patrick Cason

Scholar Raise is a fintech startup that helps people save for college with the help of their friends and family. The company is comprised of roughly five people. I designed and developed the entire web application since the company's inception and led a revolving team of full-stack developers to assist with the initial build-out and ongoing maintenance. Scholar Raise has been a fully-remote team since its inception in 2018, working with developers in Brazil, Portugal, and the UK.

The target audience is primarily American families aged 21-45 struggling to adequately save for their children's future education. To date, we've helped hundreds of families save over $2m towards their children's future educational expenses.

The application is a fully-responsive web application written in Next.js (React), using Tailwind CSS and Chakra UI to create reusable UI components. We also integrated it with a Ruby on Rails API (which is now being redeveloped using Node.js). We used the Stripe, Plaid, and Twilio APIs to provide a series of banking and communication into the product.

OpenMined is an open-source software development community attempting to solve the problem of privacy, security, and sovereignty of data ownership in the modern world. I was one of the founding team members of OpenMined, helping to grow the community from 0 to over 14,000 community members. In addition to being a contributor, I was promoted to lead the Federated Learning team and eventually the Engineering team for the entire organization.

While leading the Federated Learning team, my team and I created the world's first open-source libraries for federated learning on the web, native mobile (Android and iOS), server, and IoT. Such libraries are integrated with TensorFlow, Tensorflow.js, and PyTorch for easy integration with existing data science codebases and notebooks.

I was eventually promoted to lead the entire Engineering team, which included a total headcount of over 80 fully-remote data scientists, developers, and cryptographers working on over 10+ libraries. During this time, I wrote of numerous software development grants that were presented, approved, and funded by Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and the University of California.

Raise Financial is a suite of financial products aimed at helping young Americans get ahead on their savings goals. The website processes over $30,000 in transactions through Stripe and Plaid each month and has helped parents save $3+ million towards future educational expenses.