Samuel Cole

Experience

• 6

  Lemontree

  Advisor 2026–present

  CTO Jun 2023–May 2026

  Founding Engineer 2021–Jun 2023

  • Built the software for Lemontree’s corporate-volunteering program, which accounted for the majority of the organization’s 2025 revenue.
  • Founding engineer on a NYC helpline that grew to help over a million people in 11 regions in 2025.
  • Architected the Twilio, Postgres/AWS, and Vertex AI platform; as CTO owned technology strategy and budget.
  • Hired and managed a 3–5-person global research team responsible for data quality.
  • Hired a bootcamp graduate as an engineering fellow; mentored her to a full-time engineer offer two months ahead of schedule.
  • Built Gemini Flash flagging from client reports and web research; used Deepgram transcripts of researcher-placed calls and Gemini extraction. 68% more flags were cleared per week.
  2021 – present
• 5

  ActBlue

  Senior Software Engineer

  • Rewrote the donation-form server (Sinatra → Node) and refactored card tokenization to keep payment fields in the secure iframe.
  • Led an embeddable donation form alongside a designer, security reviewers, and backend engineers; used by all presidential primary candidates and the full nonprofit customer base, from Wix sites to the NAACP and Everytown.
  • Worked directly with customers, including weekly Biden general-election standups.
  2017 – 2021
• 4

  Abacus

  Full-Stack Engineer

  • One of five engineers; built expense search and receipts. Acquired by Emburse.
  2015 – 2017
• 3

  Jukely

  Lead Web Engineer

  • Employee #8; shipped Canada currency and localization in one week.
  2014 – 2015
• 2

  Kickstarter

  Software Engineer

  • Employee #12, one of the first two full-time engineers; owned client-side engineering as Kickstarter crossed $1B in cumulative pledges.
  • Built the project editor, search, creator/backer tools, and HTML5-default video.
  2010 – 2014
• 1

  Patch

  Front-End Web Engineer

  • First front-end engineer; built CMS for hundreds of small-town news sites.
  2008 – 2010