John Sullivan

johnsullivan.pem@gmail.com • johncs.com

Shmeppy Lead Software Engineer & Founder
2018 – Present

  • Bootstrapped the SaaS business from ideation to launch. Conducting market research, UX design, and finally architecting and implementing a full-featured product on Node.js, TypeScript, and React.
  • Built a branded subscription system on Stripe Elements and optimized the onboarding funnel to attract 27K users who built 80K maps.
  • Developed analytics pipelines in Python and Rust which could instantly process 500M logs and drove many decisions like the timing of the premium accounts launch and which marketing channels to invest in.

Khan Academy Senior Software Engineer
2016 – 2018

  • Bootstrapped a team of five to finish the work of a critical, failed project that aimed to drastically expand their localization abilities. Quickly onboarded new Senior Engineers and conducted end-user interviews and high-level design while becoming an expert in an aging part of the GCP, Python, and React codebase.
  • Proposed, designed, and co-built a Selenium end-to-end testing system that prevented critical flows like signup and login from going down despite their continuous deployments.

Khan Academy Software Engineer
2014 – 2016

  • Built the React frontend for the launch of Official SAT® Practice, led a team of four to lay a foundation for new test prep products, and was promoted shortly after.
  • Championed adoption of Flux (later Redux) simplifying state management across the company.
  • Created their original engineering blog to help with recruiting and knowledge-sharing internally and beyond.

Mozilla Software Engineer Intern
2014

Decreased DNS lookup latency on all Mozilla products by leveraging OS caches (using C++).

Khan Academy Software Engineer Intern
2013

Rebuilt their search engine, reducing indexing latency from days to minutes, improving engagement.

JetHead Development Software Engineer Intern
2012 and 2013

Rebuilt the entirety of their closed captioning systems, drastically improving their products' reliability.

John CS Development Software Engineer & Founder (Part-Time Contracts)
2007 – 2013

Completed over 20 contracts including building ColorTrack Realtime's desktop interface and a CMS for a senior community home broker in C# and WPF, and a ribbon toolbar with RTL language support in VB6.