Samuel Cole

Experience

1. 6

   Lemontree

   CTO

   Transformed a NYC helpline serving a handful of people a day into a food-access system helping over a million people across 11 regions in 2025. Built an LLM pipeline (Gemini Flash) that 2.5×'d call volume for a 3–5-person team across Pakistan, the Philippines, and Kenya. Mentored an engineer; owned strategy, budget, and infrastructure.

   2021 – Present
2. 5

   ActBlue

   Senior Software Engineer

   At the Democratic fundraising platform: rewrote the main donation-form server (Ruby Sinatra → Node; ops later lifted it to AWS unchanged) and the company's PCI tokenizer. Solo, built a new embed from scratch at 100% test coverage. Contributions scaled from ~$1B to over $8B. Embed powered the Biden presidential campaign, the NAACP, Everytown, and more.

   2017 – 2021
3. 4

   Abacus

   Full-Stack Engineer

   One of 5 engineers building tools for enterprises to manage employee spending. Shipped receipt view, a redesigned search and faceting system, automated flight metadata, and trip-level grouping. Acquired by Emburse.

   2015 – 2017
4. 3

   Jukely

   Lead Web Engineer

   Employee #8 at a live-music subscription startup. Built the client-side app from scratch in React / webpack / Reflux; contributed to the Rails API, including the company's first Stripe integration. When the CEO announced a Canada launch a week out with no code written, shipped full-stack currency and localization, on time.

   2014 – 2015
5. 2

   Kickstarter

   Software Engineer

   Employee #12, one of the first two full-time engineers; joined pre-launch. Owned the client side as Kickstarter scaled from $28M in annual pledges to crossing $1B cumulative (March 2014), with 22,000+ projects funded in 2014 alone. Built the front-end of the multistep project editor (still the basic shape of today's flow), site search, custom text editors, creator messaging / backer tools, admin tooling, and the first mainstream HTML5 video player.

   2010 – 2014
6. 1

   Patch

   Front-End Web Engineer

   First front-end engineer; joined before the company had a name. Built the CMS and front-end architecture that scaled to hundreds of small-town news sites across America, plus a system for rendering highly customized neighborhood maps. Acquired by AOL.

   2008 – 2010
7. 0

   Rochester Institute of Technology

   B.S., Multidisciplinary Studies

   Computer Science & Literature; minor in Creative Writing.

   2004 – 2008

Skills

Languages

TypeScript·Node.js·Next.js·React·Ruby on Rails

Infra & Data

Postgres·Prisma·Redis·AWS (RDS, ECS)·Vercel·GitHub Actions·ETL pipelines

APIs & AI

Mapbox·Twilio·Google Cloud·Vertex AI (Gemini)·AI SDK·LLM agents