Samuel Cole

Founding engineer and CTO. I make things from scratch.

Experience

Lemontree

CTO

Joined as founding engineer and grew into CTO of a tech non-profit connecting people to free food. Designed and scaled an AI-assisted helpline to 20,000+ daily users across 11 regions. Built an intelligence pipeline combining field reports, agentic web research, and human sourcing to maintain real-time ground truth on food access. Built a client intelligence layer that carries full conversation context across interactions. Only two engineers at peak.

ActBlue

Senior Software Engineer

Hired as a senior client side engineer to the Donor Experience team. Re-wrote the form server from a Ruby Sinatra app to a Node app, while refactoring and tidying up client-side code. Mentored engineers and led technical projects, including an embeddable form used by the Biden presidential campaign and nonprofits like the NAACP and Everytown.

Abacus

Full Stack Engineer

Hired as a full stack engineer focused on the client side. Built products to help enterprise customers visualize and manage employee spending, including: receipt view; redesigned search/faceting tools; automated flight metadata; and grouping by trips.

Jukely

Lead Web Engineer

Hired as lead web engineer and 8th employee, built a client side app in React with webpack and Reflux. Created the web client which allowed people to subscribe in many cities across three countries and discover live music events. Helped out with the Ruby on Rails API where needed, including the first version of the Stripe integrations to handle paid subscriptions.

Kickstarter

Software Engineer

Hired as first client side engineer and 12th employee. Created things including: site search, custom text editors, video players, the process for creating a project, tools for project creators to manage messages and backers, and tools for administrators to review, publish, and feature projects. Mentored less-experienced engineers and less-technical folks in JavaScript.

Patch

Front End Web Engineer

Hired as first front end engineer, designed and architected the front end development patterns that scaled the product to 100s of small towns across America. Helped build a CMS that included features including media management, authorship, layout and taxonomies. Also built a system for rendering highly customized maps.

Education

Rochester Institute of Technology
B.S., Multidisciplinary Studies: Computer Science & Literature; minor in Creative Writing