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Dak Washbrook

Career

I build products, the platforms behind them, and tools that help teams ship.

Over 15 years across startups and established companies—from founding products to retail systems serving 16 million users. My work spans interfaces, backend services, infrastructure, and AI.

Now

Aug 2026 – Present

Full-time

Mercury

Senior Software Engineer, AI Experiences

  • Returned to Mercury to help make banking through AI better.
  • Part of the team behind Mercury Command, its AI agent and workflows, API, MCP, and CLI.

Experience

Product engineering, technical leadership, and founding teams.

Feb 2026 – Jul 2026

Full-time

Bay Area, CA

Stealth Startup

Member of Technical Staff

  • Owned delivery across mobile, web, and on-device software at an AI hardware startup.
  • Built onboarding, identity, device provisioning, and voice and face training end to end.
  • Built services in Bun, TypeScript, Effect, and Rust, with interfaces in Expo, React Native, React, and Vite. Used agentic workflows to accelerate delivery while preserving type safety and UI quality.

Jul 2025 – Feb 2026

Full-time

Mercury

Senior Software Engineer, Cards

  • Helped launch Standalone IO to beta: a dashboard for credit-only organizations and external accounts integrated with Plaid.
  • Built reusable card-issuance primitives and resolved production-blocking PostgreSQL and KYC issues.

May 2025

Contract

Zero Email

Software Engineer

  • Built an AI email composer that learned each user’s writing style from sent messages and generated contextual drafts.
  • Worked across Cloudflare, Bun, PostgreSQL, Next.js, and tRPC.

Jul 2024 – Jul 2025

Early-stage startup

  • Co-founded a network intelligence product with self-serve discovery and onboarding for an initial cohort of 150 customers.
  • Built ingestion, retrieval, vector embedding, and durable background processing to turn relationship data into AI-powered workflows.

Jul 2022 – Jul 2024

Concurrent venture

Trestle

Co-Founder & Founding Engineer

  • Co-founded a construction collaboration platform and took it from zero to launch, with architecture that supported a $2.1M pre-seed raise.
  • Led product and technical direction using Next.js and TypeScript; built concurrent AI pipelines for similarity analysis across public records.

Jul 2019 – Jul 2024

Full-time

Weedmaps

Lead Senior Software Engineer

  • Led architecture and full-stack delivery for retail workflows serving 500,000+ businesses and 16M users.
  • Built shared CI/CD infrastructure and Go tooling that improved engineering efficiency by 60%.
  • Led ML-assisted compliance work that cut training iteration time by 50%, and helped migrate production from AWS ECS to Kubernetes.

Nov 2016 – Oct 2019

Full-time

NCSoft

Lead Senior Software Engineer (Backend)

  • Sole backend engineer for a platform supporting AAA game launches and 100,000+ monthly active users.
  • Rebuilt PHP services in Node.js and TypeScript, introduced GraphQL, and expanded the backend contributor pool fivefold.
  • Led production services onto Kubernetes and Jenkins.

Oct 2010 – Nov 2016

Full-time

Dellamoda

Lead Software Engineer

  • Built Python automation that increased operational throughput by 5,000%.
  • Built an end-to-end Laravel application for customers and internal teams that improved system efficiency by 600%.

Alongside my full-time work

2019 – Present

Independent consulting

The Web Team

Co-Owner & Software Consultant

  • Hands-on architecture, full-stack implementation, developer platforms, and practical AI integration for companies building new products.

Selected projects

Community, volunteer work, and products I’ve built beyond my day job.

Oct 2024 – Present

Volunteer leadership

tech night!

As volunteer Director of Technology, built technight.events as a professional networking and event-discovery platform, then helped grow the community through meetups, hackathons, conferences, and more than 30 hours of produced video. Mentored dozens of aspiring engineers in project execution and career planning.

Nov 2023 – Present

Volunteer project

MyAion.xyz

Rebuilt a legacy C# application in Next.js and TypeScript for more than 12,000 monthly active users. Designed caching that made key paths 10x faster while cutting database load 20x, then led a small team in evolving the product.

Sep 2012 – Aug 2019

Volunteer project

Zephyr

Designed and built an end-to-end scheduling platform and player toolset for Aion Online. Scaled it to more than 26,000 monthly active users at its peak.

Sep 2012 – Apr 2016

Volunteer project

PvP All Day

Architected and scaled a customer-facing gaming platform to more than 30,000 monthly active users, evolving it from PHP and jQuery into Laravel. Later rebuilt the archived product in Next.js and TypeScript to preserve the community and modernize the experience.

Talks

Observability in Production-grade Environments

Fullerton College · Oct 2023

Mastering Understanding in a High-Speed Industry

Fullerton College · Oct 2023

CS Master’s vs Self-Taught: What actually matters in the real world?

Moorpark College · May 2022

Awards

Next.js Conference 2024 Community Challenge Winner

Vercel · Oct 2024

Let’s build something useful.

Have a product, platform, or engineering problem in mind? Let’s talk.