Monte Thakkar

Summary

Software engineer with 10 years scaling consumer products, from founding engineer at a 0 to $1M ARR startup to a 300K+ MAU platform at Expedia Group. I own systems end to end rather than implement to spec: the data warehouse behind every company metric, the evaluation infrastructure behind our LLM features, subscription billing processing $100K monthly revenue, and the native release process across iOS and Android. Former lead maintainer of React Native Elements, an open-source UI toolkit with 400K+ monthly downloads and 25K GitHub stars.

Experience

Founding Engineer · Rosebud AI Journal2023 – Present · Santa Monica, CA

The #1 AI-powered journal for mental health and personal growth.

• Scaled the business from 0 to $1M in revenue
• Own the company data warehouse end to end (BigQuery, dbt): nine source pipelines modeling 1.2B rows across 458K users, behind every revenue, product and AI-cost metric
• Built the shared AI evaluation runner every AI feature plugs into, making prompt and model changes measurable instead of guesswork
• Shipped the practitioner dashboard MVP on a HIPAA-aligned metrics pipeline, opening a B2B surface for therapists and coaches
• Rebuilt voice dictation end to end: new UX, transcription service and custom glossary, now running 5.3M transcriptions
• Built subscription infrastructure handling $100K monthly revenue, with seamless state sync between Stripe (web) and RevenueCat (mobile)
• Identified user intent for the memory feature, driving a 10x increase in conversions and making it the top acquisition channel at 25% of new subscriptions
• Increased user conversions by 85% through A/B tested subscription flows, improving conversion rate from 11.1% to 20.6%
• Own the native release process end to end across 40+ iOS and Android releases: changelog, version cut, EAS builds, store submission
• Built the AI agent tooling the whole team develops against, a documented skill system covering code review, data analysis and release workflows

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

Vrbo is the vacation rental division within Expedia Group, the world's travel platform.

• Led Vrbo Owner iOS app development serving 300K+ monthly active users with 99.9% uptime
• Spearheaded React Native adoption in iOS app, boosting development velocity by 50% through shared UI library; shipped 6 features across multiple teams
• Implemented the redesigned "Inbox" feature eliminating 3 major blockers, driving 50% increase in iOS booking conversion rates
• Enhanced iOS app reliability with automated testing by increasing coverage by 30% and reducing manual QA time by 20% during each release

Software Engineer · Pillow2016 – 2018 · San Francisco, CA

Short-term rental hospitality startup, acquired by Expedia Group (NASDAQ: EXPE) in Sept. 2018.

• Led a team of 4 engineers building the company's mobile app in React Native
• Shipped full-stack features across React, Ruby on Rails and Postgres, including the homepage redesign

Side Projects

React Native Elements (OSS)2017 – 2019

reactnativeelements.com — Lead maintainer of the most popular open source UI toolkit for React Native, driving significant growth and community impact.

• Grew contributor base by 15x over 2 years with 400K+ monthly downloads
• Achieved milestone of 25,000 net promoters on GitHub, outperforming 20K+ competing libraries
• Secured $6,000+ in fundraising for ongoing development

Kandou Volunteering App2018 – 2020

Launched a mobile app connecting volunteers with local opportunities and CSR management tools.

• Built full-stack mobile app (iOS & Android) using React Native in 3 months
• Attracted 600 users and established partnerships with 17 San Francisco non-profits
• Facilitated 25 volunteer events, resulting in 125+ community service hours

Education

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

Technical Skills

• Languages & Frameworks · TypeScript, React Native, React, Next.js, Node.js, Swift, Python, SQL
• Data & AI · BigQuery, dbt, LLM evaluation, Postgres, Firestore, Redis, Mixpanel
• Platforms & Tooling · GCP, AWS, Firebase, Expo, Vercel, Turborepo, Jest, Git