Bryan Irace

irace.me  /   bryan@irace.me  /  Westchester, NY

Hello 👋! I’m a polyglot engineering leader who enjoys working across all parts of the technology stack and on all facets of an organization. I also write and am somewhat of a lapsed public speaker.

Nowadays I primarily build teams. At various times throughout my career, I’ve focused on iOS applications, data pipelines, frontend web applications, and servers. I solve problems and choose the right technology for each job.

My technical skills are complemented by managerial experience, product sensibilities, and a “no job too big or too small” approach to collaboration. I voraciously empower software teams to do their very best work.

Stripe

Building economic infrastructure for the Internet!

Engineering Manager, Link  /  Jan 2021 – Present

  • “Founding EM” for Link, Stripe’s networked consumer payment method—millions of consumers use Link to transact across hundreds of thousands of sites that use Stripe
  • Solely responsible for all facets of Link engineering—technical oversight, hiring, org. design—from three engineers to 40+
  • Current areas of ownership include app.link.com, authentication/security/compliance, messaging channels, and customer support

Engineering Manager, Capital  /  Jan 2020 – Dec 2020

  • Managed Stripe Capital’s underwriting team, the team that maintains Capital’s data pipeline and machine learning models.

Software Engineer, Capital  /  Apr 2019 – Dec 2019

  • Joined Stripe as the fifth engineer on the Capital team. Worked on the backend (Ruby), frontend (JavaScript), and data pipeline/machine learning models (Scala and Python)

Prefer

CTO  /  Nov 2015 – Jan 2019

I was hired by Scott Belsky (Behance, Adobe) to lead engineering as part of Prefer’s founding team (third full-time employee, first in NYC). We tried to build “the platform for the future of work,” a referral network to support meaningful independent careers across numerous professions. We raised our Series A from Benchmark, Expa, #Angels, Homebrew, and other top-tier investors.

We built four different products over the course of over three years, comprised of three native iOS applications, two React/TypeScript codebases, two Ruby on Rails servers (one using REST and one using GraphQL), and one offline community.

While the company didn’t ultimately succeed, it was an incredible experience alongside the best team I could’ve possibly hoped for.

  • Member of the executive team, reporting directly to the CEO
  • Involved in all aspects of running the company: defined overall company strategy, determined headcount, attended board meetings
  • Led all technical efforts on both consumer-facing and internal operations software, working extensively across all codebases
    • Swift
    • React/TypeScript/GraphQL
    • Ruby on Rails
  • Hired and managed six other engineers
  • Owned the product roadmap alongside our heads of product and design
  • Acted as site lead of our cross-disciplinary NYC office

Launch press: Fast Company, Forbes, Business Insider, Fortune, TechCrunch

Tumblr

I joined Tumblr when it was around 60 employees and I led development of the company’s first in-house iOS application, presiding over the app during the years when overall Tumblr usage shifted dramatically from web-based to native mobile.

I subsequently hired the rest of the iOS development team, served as the mobile team’s Staff Engineer, and eventually moved into management. I worked to re-organize the engineering department into separate product and “core” platform teams – the latter of which I managed – and developed/taught a mobile development curriculum. I reported to the company’s COO (now CEO) at the time of my departure.

Senior Engineering Manager  /  Aug 2015 – Nov 2015

  • Managed four teams
    • Core iOS
    • Core Android
    • Core API
    • Internal developer tools
  • Co-developed an iOS development training course and taught web developers throughout the company

Lead iOS Engineer  /  Mar 2012 – Aug 2015

  • Built Tumblr for iOS 3.0, a complete rewrite and the first iOS application built in-house
  • Led development on all subsequent iOS application versions
  • Developed and open-sourced the Tumblr iOS SDK
  • Converted Tumblr iOS to be completely native, using custom HTML rendering (The Verge)
  • Launched Tumblr for iPad (The Verge)
  • Implemented native mobile blog customization (The Verge)
  • Released an iOS 8 share extension on day one
  • Recruited and hired to grow the team from just myself to around ten iOS developers

Goldman Sachs

I interned at Goldman Sachs in between my junior and senior years of college, and accepted an offer to return full-time after graduation.

I spent my first two years building full-stack web applications using backend Java and frontend JavaScript, before learning Objective-C in order to build the company’s first native iOS application. The Mac mini I used for iOS development was ostensibly the very first Mac allowed on the Goldman Sachs network!

Senior Developer  /  Jul 2008 – Mar 2012

  • Lead developer of GS Research for iPad, the first native iOS application developed at Goldman Sachs
    • Integrated native code with standard web technologies for maximum performance, flexibility, and reusability
    • Implemented an inter-app communication API using the x-callback-url standard
  • Designed and implemented UIs for research offerings on the client-facing GS 360 institutional portal
  • Developed Java web applications and services for all phases of investment research distribution workflow, including HTML rendition generation and personalized email delivery
  • Wrote and published an internal whitepaper: Why Develop a Native Mobile Application?
  • Presented on topics including HTML5/CSS3, Spring IoC, and combining mobile web/native technologies
  • Member of the Mobile UX Working Group
    • Developed standards for user interface consistency across all of the firm's mobile applications

Summer Analyst  /  Jun 2007 – Aug 2007

  • Developed a Java web application to record committee approvals of investment research target price and rating changes