R Phillip Castagna

Founder and chairman of the American Leadership Foundation, a non-profit I started to give large, lump sum scholarship grants to students graduating from high school. More information on our website, usleadership.org

Seed to Series B. Built the Applied Engineering team from the ground up, owning all end-user UIs, shared data infrastructure, authentication and authorization systems, and data observability across the stack. Manager for 6 direct reports. Partnered with the Research team to productionize core technologies developed at Smack, hardening prototypes into products that solved real end-user problems.

Principal engineer and manager for up to 5 direct reports while personally implementing core functionality in existing notes app code base and architecting new knowledge graph app. Personally built “Paper To Graph” system using LLMs to extract entity-relationship knowledge graphs from open access research papers available through pub med. Architected sync systems for web and mobile apps supporting both offline use and concurrent multi-user editing.

First technical hire, building an accounting SaaS product for biotech companies running clinical trials. Owned technical architecture and established engineering practices as both principal engineer and manager of 5. Initialized the repository and had an MVP running from scratch in under 6 months.

Engineer on the Issuing team in Banking-as-a-Service division.

Engineer on “Audience Building” workstream of Facebook’s new Pages experience. Personally built the new Lightweight Ad Experience workflows for the new account type on desktop and mobile. Core contributor to Audience Insight surfaces for desktop and mobile. Also worked on the "Unified Editor" internal team, building product tooling on top of overhauled web editor open-sourced as Lexical.

Full stack software engineer working on the Drive Sharing team — any time you share a Google Doc or something like that with somebody, that was our code. Highlights: * End-to-end ownership of a new setting for domain admins to be able to limit the movement of content outside of their domain * Owned G.D.P.R. compliance for the Drive server-side permissions library * Core contributor to “pin-code sharing” feature letting users share G Suite native files (Google Docs, Sheets, etc) to users without Google accounts * Part of regular oncall rotation, managed team's deployments and outage resolution

Core developer for new commercial website focused on recreational travel: chose underlying technologies, developed application structure, implemented Django backend, designed API, built frontend client in React, implemented OAuth authentication, wrote testing suite, implemented continuous integration server, implemented design specifications, ensured responsive design functionality. Did secondary work in big data analytics including software built on Hadoop and Accumulo.

Developed inventory analysis models, including extensive planning for the opening of Holy Cross Germantown, the first new hospital in Maryland in 70 years. Acting supervisor for shift of up to 15 staff.

Worked in a variety of capacities across the supply chain department and became thoroughly involved with quality control and inventory analysis.