Monte Thakkar

Summary

Full-stack and mobile engineer with 10 years building consumer products across React Native, iOS and web. Founding engineer at Rosebud (AI journal, 150K+ users), where I built its core data, billing and notification infrastructure from zero. Before that, four years on Vrbo's Owner iOS app at Expedia Group (300K+ MAU). Lead maintainer of React Native Elements, an open-source UI library.

Experience

Founding Engineer · Rosebud2022 – Present · Los Angeles, CA

AI journal with 150K+ users and $6M in seed funding.

• Built the company's data warehouse from scratch (1B+ rows, 53 models; BigQuery, dbt), powering all revenue, product and AI-cost metrics
• Built Rosebud's native billing system, now processing 86% of subscription revenue, with a single entitlement model across Stripe and RevenueCat; scaled from 0 to 88% of payment events without changing the API contract in two years
• Took Rosebud from web-only to iOS and Android in 2024 by setting up a Turborepo monorepo (7 apps, 30 packages)
• Grew memory-driven purchases from 1% to ~30% of new subscriptions in five months, making memory the #1 purchase source by showing the upsell at the moment of intent
• Rebuilt voice dictation, the app's main input, now supporting 5M+ transcriptions at 99.98% success with a native recorder, length-based speech-to-text, LLM cleanup and a user glossary
• Designed the push pipeline that sends ~2M device notifications a month: paginated Firestore reads, batched Expo sends, a Redis receipt handoff and a cron that prunes dead tokens
• Shipped a practitioner dashboard MVP across the stack to test a B2B product for therapists: a native consent flow, consent records and a web dashboard on a HIPAA-aligned pipeline. The team reused its restricted data zone within three weeks
• Migrated the rosebud.app marketing site (184 URLs) from Webflow to a prerendered Next.js app in six days using a full agent harness; mobile Lighthouse went from 57 to 92 and non-engineers now ship through the agent workflow
• Built the team's coding-agent workflows for PR authoring and review, now used on ~30% of PRs; created the initial AGENTS.md and authored 8 of its 27 agent skills

Senior Software Engineer · Expedia Group2018 – 2022 · Austin, TX

Vrbo Owner iOS app, Expedia Group's vacation rental division: 300K+ monthly active users, 4.6★ across 116K+ App Store ratings.

• Brought 3 teams onto React Native by leading the platform at Vrbo: a shared UI library and a week-long workshop for 100+ engineers and product leaders
• Lifted iOS booking conversion 50% by rebuilding the Inbox reply flow in native iOS, so owners answered and accepted requests faster
• Cut manual QA time per release 20% and raised coverage 30% by leading the iOS app's test automation: 40+ E2E and UI tests

Software Engineer · Pillow2016 – 2018 · San Francisco, CA

Short-term rental hospitality startup ($16.5M raised), acquired by Expedia Group (NASDAQ: EXPE) in Oct. 2018.

• Launched the Pillow Pro React Native app on iOS and Android in under 4 weeks as lead engineer, with two contributing engineers
• Cut server costs 10x by containerizing the Rails application and moving it off Heroku. Cut Pillow.com load time by 4 seconds and page size by 50%

Side Projects

Lead Maintainer · React Native Elements (OSS)2017 – 2019

• Grew the open-source library to 17.8K GitHub stars (from 3.6K) and 35x in monthly downloads (7.7K to 267K). Led a core team of 4–5 maintainers across time zones and published 31 npm releases

Education

Bachelor's in Computer Science · San Francisco State University2014 – 2017

Technical Skills

• Languages & Frameworks · TypeScript, React, React Native, Next.js, Node.js, Swift, Python, SQL
• Data & AI · BigQuery, dbt, Postgres, Supabase, Firestore, Redis, Vercel AI SDK, Claude & OpenAI APIs, LLM evals
• Platforms & Tooling · GCP, Cloud Functions, AWS, Firebase, Vercel, Expo/EAS, Turborepo, GitHub Actions, Stripe, RevenueCat, Jest