Erick Katzenstein
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Engineer and Full-stack Developer
New York, NY, United States
Toptal member since May 24, 2017
Erick is a full-stack engineer with exceptional velocity and an obsession for UX design. With 15 years of experience in engineering and design, his main areas of expertise include product development, 3D interaction, data visualization, and conversational AI (ChatGPT and Llama 2). Erick can build an entire product from scratch and looks forward to the next exciting project.
Portfolio
Experience
- JavaScript - 12 years
- Three.js - 10 years
- D3.js - 10 years
- PostgreSQL - 8 years
- React - 6 years
- Next.js - 4 years
- TypeScript - 3 years
- OpenAI GPT-4 API - 1 year
Availability
Preferred Environment
React, D3.js, Three.js, Figma, Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, UI Animation, OpenAI GPT-4 API, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Back-end, Full-stack, Front-end Development, REST, ECMAScript (ES6), REST APIs
The most amazing...
...thing I've built recently is a conversational AI tool for generating Spotify playlists with ChatGPT.
Work Experience
Chief Technology Officer
Hi-BB, LLC
- Built Hi-BB, your personal beauty shopper, from the ground up. The service aims to eliminate decision fatigue in shopping for products, leveraging AI and data science.
- Acted as the lead engineer and designer, collaborating with a team of expert advisors in the beauty industry. We offer more than 20,000 product options collected from multiple public data sources.
- Bootstrapped the project without funding. I'm the technical cofounder with one partner, the CEO.
Lead Product Engineer
Arena
- Served as the tech and design lead for Arena's core product, providing tools for customers to visualize AI performance.
- Worked as the tech and design lead for GTM pursuits, rapid prototyping, and fast-paced demo development.
- Developed a component library for internal use at Arena.
Senior Software Engineer
- Built internal products for platform engineers to visualize network traffic and detect and remediate fleet health issues across data centers.
- Worked as a front-end and design lead on Mechanic, Twitter's internal tool for automating the remediation of hardware failures.
- Worked as a front-end and design lead on Network Health Visualizer, a customized tool to visualize network traffic at Twitter.
Senior Software Engineer
Enigma Technologies
- Acted as the tech lead for a user experience platform, an Enigma demo, and Enigma Labs.
- Worked as a design and tech lead for the rapid prototyping of Enigma Labs.
- Served as a design and tech lead for Enigma's company graph demo.
Interactive 3D Graphics Developer
Fitd Furniture Ltd
- Contributed to this project as a full-stack developer.
- Handled comprehensive design in collaboration with the client.
- Implemented custom WebGL/GLSL in tandem with Three.js.
- Developed a Node.js/PostgreSQL back end and a React/Redux front end.
- Contributed to an adaptive parametric model complete with pricing logic.
Lead Developer
Mode Lab
- Led the New York development team—focusing on the strategic growth and success of the online research and development initiatives.
- Developed full-stack web and desktop apps with 3D interaction, data visualization, and parametric CAD models.
- Conducted in-depth work with client teams. Focused on all aspects of the company's business, including project management, customer relations, strategy, and advanced research and development.
Senior Technology Specialist
Mode Lab
- Acted as the tech lead on several computational modeling projects, developing tools for custom CAD applications and web applications.
- Led several educational programs on technology training—focusing on the adoption of custom tools developed in-house.
- Led 12 workshops in over two years on parametric modeling in architecture and product design with clients and participants from various technology conferences.
Experience
Hi-BB Personalized Beauty Product Shopper
https://www.hi-bb.com/• Generative LLM (OpenAI)
• Live chat and survey
• Custom semantic search (embeddings)
• Custom decision tree classifier
• Custom taxonomic product classifier
• Retrieval augmentation generation (RAG) pipeline
• Checkouts with CC, Google Pay, and Apple Pay (Stripe)
• Data collection pipeline (publicly available data, mainly with Puppeteer)
• Push and real-time endpoints (Supabase)
• Authentication via phone/text OTP (Twilio)
• Order management, supply chain, customer emails (Resend, SMTP, Stripe)
• Full feature progress web app
• Monitoring, event tagging, and observability
• Training data for reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF, under development)
• Automated testing (E2E)
• Admin interface with server-side components
Atlist
https://www.atlist.ai/This was a personal passion project. Sharing recommendations for friends visiting my city isn't easy, so it's still a work in progress.
Chat Jams
https://www.chatjams.ai/Arena Analyze: ML Performance Dashboard
https://apollo.arena-ai.com/The design challenge was to make this dashboard agnostic to the industry and surface specific and custom KPIs for different clients. The responsive design enables users to "opt-in" to a given metric for further study.
The technical challenge was to surface aggregated metrics and drill-down data. For optimal performance, the top-level aggregations were rendered with D3 and SVG, while the drill-down metrics were rendered with WebGL.
The back end is powered by an LDAP database (Snowflake) coupled with PostgreSQL for app-specific storage.
Role: designer and tech lead of a team of six.
Company Graph
https://vimeo.com/348447657I was the tech, design, and product lead on this project.
Cedar: Interactive Real Estate Development
https://www.cedar.build/• Implementation of three custom line weights for architectural rendering.
• Development of animated transitions across different design scenarios.
• Integration of ambient occlusion and tone mapping, ensuring optimal performance.
• Conversion of tilemap to GeoJSON format.
• Creation of custom generative modeling solutions.
Fitd 3D Cupboard Configurator
https://fitd-demo.vercel.appI worked on the development of WebGL, the back and front end, and the design (solo project). This comprehensive site was built in collaboration with a startup based out of London, UK.
Technology stack: Node.js, React, WebGL, Three.js, Stripe, Acuity, SendGrid
3D Bike Configurator
https://go-configure.vercel.app/This project is developed using Three.js and React, offering estimates for configuring indoor bike racks. Its key features include:
• Bike count and sizing optimization
• PDF export of specs and floor plan, dynamically updated with user configurations
• Complex design schema and storage configuration
• Complex 3D scene with hundreds of rendered bicycle proxies
GetMyVaccine
https://www.getmyvaccine.org/Emojimation
https://ekatzenstein.github.io/emojimation/This package's initial conception was for the React Riot Hackathon 2017—where our team took home the Innovation Award.
Education
Master of Architecture Degree in Architecture
University of Pennsylvania - Philadelphia, PA, USA
Bachelor of Arts Degree in Architecture and Math
University of Pennsylvania - Philadelphia, PA, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, D3.js, Three.js, React, Mapbox GL, jQuery, REST APIs, WebGL, Puppeteer, Pandas, Stripe API, Stripe, Acuity Scheduling API, Twilio API
Tools
CAD, Rhinoceros 3D, Grasshopper, Adobe, ChatGPT, AutoCAD 2D, AutoCAD 3D, Revit, InDesign CC, Create React App, Canvas, Git, AutoCAD, Figma
Languages
SQL, JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, HTML, ECMAScript (ES6), GLSL, GraphQL, Python 3, Python, Gremlin
Frameworks
Express.js, Electron, Next.js, Redux, Material UI, Cypress, React Native, Jest, Django
Paradigms
REST, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Agile
Platforms
Web, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Vercel, Mapbox, MacOS
Storage
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis
Other
SVG, Data Visualization, 3D, Design, Front-end, Content Management Systems (CMS), UI Animation, OpenAI GPT-4 API, Full-stack, APIs, User Interface (UI), User Experience (UX), Visualization, Dashboards, Front-end Development, Animation, Web Development, API Integration, Chatbots, OpenAI, 3D Product Modeling, Mapbox Styling, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Conversational AI, Zustand, Framer, Web Scraping, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Back-end, OpenAI GPT-3 API, Edge Computing, Llama, Pineapple, Fintech, Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), Design Language, Storybook, SEO Tools, 3D Art, WebSockets, PDF, Neptune, Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo), Supabase, Styled-components, SMTP
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