Monte Thakkar

Summary

Full-stack engineer with 10 years shipping consumer products. As founding engineer at Rosebud, an AI journal with 150K+ users, I built its AI voice dictation (5M+ transcriptions), the data warehouse behind its metrics, and the team's coding-agent workflows. Previously led React Native adoption at Vrbo (Expedia Group); lead maintainer of React Native Elements.

Experience

Founding Engineer · Rosebud2022 – Present · Los Angeles, CA

AI journal with 150K+ users and $6M in seed funding.

• Rebuilt voice dictation, the app's main input, which has run 5M+ transcriptions at 99.8% success: benchmarked 7 speech-to-text models, defined a named-entity error metric, and shipped length-based model routing with an LLM cleanup pass
• Grew memory-driven purchases from 1% to ~30% of new subscriptions in five months by showing the upsell at the moment of intent, making long-term memory (which lets Rosebud's AI draw on what a user wrote in past entries) the #1 purchase source
• Cut input tokens 20–30x per weekly report by moving it and three content generators onto the agent runtime, gated on a 180-run paired A/B eval with an LLM judge (bad outputs from 11% to 2%)
• Took Rosebud from web-only to iOS and Android in 2024, setting up its Turborepo monorepo (7 apps, 30 packages) and building the native billing that now carries 86% of subscription revenue
• Architected and built the company's data warehouse from scratch, now the source of all revenue, product and AI-cost metrics (BigQuery, dbt; 1B+ rows, 53 models)
• Set the team's coding-agent standards and fixed its CI: wrote the first AGENTS.md and 8 of 27 shared agent skills (PR workflows now on ~30% of PRs), and capped six-hour CI hangs at 10 minutes

Senior Software Engineer · Expedia Group2018 – 2022 · Austin, TX

Vrbo Owner iOS app, Expedia Group's vacation rental division: 300K+ monthly active users, 4.6★ across 116K+ App Store ratings.

• Brought 3 teams onto React Native by leading the platform at Vrbo: a shared UI library and a week-long workshop for 100+ engineers and product leaders
• Lifted iOS booking conversion 50% by rebuilding the Inbox reply flow in native iOS, so owners answered and accepted requests faster
• Cut manual QA time per release 20% and raised coverage 30% by leading the iOS app's test automation: 40+ E2E and UI tests

Software Engineer · Pillow2016 – 2018 · San Francisco, CA

Short-term rental hospitality startup ($16.5M raised), acquired by Expedia Group (NASDAQ: EXPE) in Oct. 2018.

• Launched the Pillow Pro React Native app on iOS and Android in under 4 weeks as lead engineer, with two contributing engineers
• Cut server costs 10x by containerizing the Rails application and moving it off Heroku. Cut Pillow.com load time by 4 seconds and page size by 50%

Side Projects

Lead Maintainer · React Native Elements (OSS)2017 – 2019

• Grew the open-source library to 17.8K GitHub stars (from 3.6K) and 35x in monthly downloads (7.7K to 267K). Led a core team of 4–5 maintainers across time zones and published 31 npm releases

Education

Bachelor's in Computer Science · San Francisco State University2014 – 2017

Technical Skills

• Languages & Frameworks · TypeScript, React, React Native, Next.js, Node.js, Swift, Python, SQL
• Data & AI · BigQuery, dbt, Postgres, Supabase, Firestore, Redis, Vercel AI SDK, Claude & OpenAI APIs, LLM evals
• Platforms & Tooling · GCP, Cloud Functions, AWS, Firebase, Vercel, Expo/EAS, Turborepo, GitHub Actions, Stripe, RevenueCat, Jest