Product-driven technology leader with 15+ years of experience building and scaling engineering organizations across startups and high-growth environments.
nimakhoshini@gmail.com
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Github
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Experience
Director of Engineering
Voltron Data ↗
Sept 2022 – Present
Remote & New York, NY
- Led the UI, Platform Services, and Performance Engineering teams supporting Voltron Data’s flagship product, Theseus.
- Championed cross-team collaboration to integrate advanced query execution features into the Theseus UI.
- Mentored engineers into leadership roles and spearheaded company-wide documentation and knowledge-sharing initiatives.
- Led the development of Voltron Data’s first end-user–facing service, Theseus Test Drive.
- Delivered product demonstrations to clients, highlighting key features and value propositions.
- Partnered with the Theseus Engine team to design and orchestrate Python UDFs for complex, GPU-intensive workflows, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines
CTO & Co-Founder
Ghost Messenger (formerly WDYT)
April 2020 - September 2022
Remote & San Francisco, CA
- Supported successful seed-round fundraising, resulting in $8 million raised.
- Provided technical leadership for server-side development, managing a team of web and
backend engineers.
- Managed backend engineering and DevOps utilizing AWS and GCP with Terraform, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD.
- Recruited and scaled multidisciplinary teams across engineering and community operations.
Director of Platform Engineering
GIPHY ↗
Jan 2017 - Mar 2020
New York, NY
- Migrated GIPHY microservices from REST to gRPC, achieving a 10× reduction in CPU usage.
- Led Kubernetes adoption for containerized deployments, reducing EC2 usage and improving
fault tolerance.
- Developed shared components for OpenTracing adoption into GIPHY microservices to uncover latency issues.
- Designed GIPHY’s ML pipeline for content safety, celebrity detection, and GIF annotation.
- Migrated legacy databases to DynamoDB, featured in AWS Startup Blog, and highlighted by Werner Vogels.
CTO & Co-Founder
Imoji
May 2014 - Dec 2016
San Francisco, CA
- Co-founded and led engineering for Imoji, acquired by GIPHY in 2016.
- Built open-source SDKs for Android and iOS; integrated into 300+ apps, including Dubsmash and Fleksy.
- Grew team to five developers and a product manager; fostered collaborative culture through demos and learning sessions.
- Imoji was featured in The Today Show
- GIPHY acquired Imoji in 2017
Software Engineer & Team Lead
Apple ↗
Apr 2010 - May 2014
Cupertino, CA
- Architected core Siri functions including messaging, reminders, and sports.
- Built performant, thread-safe JNI bridges for Siri’s natural language processing framework.
Senior User Interface Developer
Siri, Inc.
Apr 2010 - May 2014
San Jose, CA
- Developed cross-platform UI infrastructure for Siri's iPhone app using Java, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010 ↗
Skills
Programming
- Kotlin
- Golang
- Python
- TypeScript
- Java
- JavaScript
Platform & Tools
- AWS
- GCP
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Terraform
- ArgoCD
Leadership
- Team Building
- Hiring
- Technical Mentorship
- Product-Driven Development