Curriculum Vitae — Sean Yalda

Practice

Engineering, design,
and pedagogy as
one practice.

Senior full-stack engineer with 12+ years architecting enterprise platform infrastructure, AI-augmented pipelines, and education-sector applications. Deep across the backend: authentication, learner data models, content delivery, platform abstractions. Most major products extend to full ownership, with UX design and frontend implementation delivered alongside the architecture as a single unit.

Building and shipping production AI orchestration with LangGraph.js, Vertex AI, and the Anthropic API. LLM integration and agentic tooling are central to daily engineering, not peripheral.

Founding engineer at PlayVS, scaled from MVP through a $50M Series C across 30+ NFHS-sanctioned states. U.S. patent in augmented reality for printed books. Adjunct lecturer at Oakland University, 160+ hours of curriculum translating pedagogical intent into structured learning architecture.

Work History

Experience.

Sayari

Senior Software Engineer

Enterprise risk intelligence · Los Angeles, Remote

Architected and built a production AI orchestration platform from the ground up using LangGraph.js, Vertex AI, and TypeScript, coordinating multi-stage investigative workflows across Elasticsearch, BigQuery, and Memgraph. Compresses hours of manual analyst work into minutes. Won the 2026 company AI hackathon.
Designed and delivered bulk user provisioning and authentication integrated with Auth0, HubSpot, and Salesforce, automating free-trial account creation and saving the sales team hundreds of hours while generating thousands of qualified leads.
Led company-wide Mixpanel analytics strategy across 100+ instrumented metrics; enforced a practice of success metrics in every PRD, partnering with the product team to establish evidence-based decision-making across growth and product.
Built the Projects featureset end-to-end: designed the UX and implemented an interactive CSV upload pipeline with real-time validation, normalisation, and error recovery using TanStack React Table, React Query, Redux, Rx.js, TypeScript, and io-ts.
Co-built Sayari Map from concept to MVP in under six months as one of three engineers, opening an entirely new customer segment in geospatial risk and supply chain screening.
Mentored engineers who now own full product domains; regularly engaged in COO-level cross-functional technical discussions across security, infrastructure, and data teams.

Nov 2021
Present

Current

PlayVS

Web Development Manager · Founding Employee

Student esports education platform · Los Angeles

Joined as the first employee. Helped CEO Delane Parnell raise the seed round with Science Inc., designed the MVP, and produced fundraising pitch decks for the $15M Series A.
Led product engineering as Technical Product Manager through the $30M Series B; drove growth and marketing engineering during the $50M Series C. Scaled from zero to tens of thousands of student users nationally.
Architected a headless CMS content platform (Prismic) inspired by the NY Times' "The Scoop" publishing engine, with built-in media management, multiple editorial templates, a flexible component system, and a rich taxonomy. Reduced content production times by 60%.
Owned end-to-end: designed the UX and built the platform MVP using Next.js (SSR, code splitting, HMR), integrated with the PlayVS league engine via REST API for real-time regional data; led a team of four engineers with AWS Elastic Beanstalk and CloudWatch CI/CD monitoring.

Jan 2018
Apr 2021

FACINGS, Inc.

Technical Product Manager & Engineer

NFT creator platform · Remote

Designed and built the FACINGS marketing site and product platform: a Shopify-style SaaS dashboard (Next.js, Redux, Node.js) enabling NFT creators to configure, publish, and manage collections, campaigns, orders, customers, and an online store without engineering intervention.
Designed the interactive multi-step onboarding flow, translating complex blockchain configuration into a guided UX accessible to non-technical creators.
Architected an on-demand NFT asset creation API on the WAX blockchain, enabling new asset types to be defined through the platform UI without code changes.

Apr 2021
Apr 2022

OSLabs / GraphQL Blueprint

Software Engineer · Open Source

Open-source developer tooling · Los Angeles

Produced an open-source tool to auto-generate GraphQL schemas, queries, and mutations, plus NoSQL schemas and SQL build scripts. Used by several hundred engineers, approximately half of whom exported generated boilerplate directly into their projects.
Built parsing algorithms to dynamically generate deeply nested typed code structures without blocking the main thread; delivered unit test coverage with Jest and CI/CD to AWS EC2 via CircleCI.

Jan 2021
Nov 2021

Oakland University

Advanced Web Design Lecturer

DES330 · Rochester Hills, Michigan

Designed and delivered a 160+ hour curriculum for Advanced Web Design, mentoring 15 undergraduate graphic design students.
Constructed the full course syllabus including lecture content, project briefs, and assessment rubrics, translating professional web engineering practice into structured pedagogical architecture.

Aug 2016
Dec 2016

Pitch Black Media

UX/UI Engineer & Front-End Developer

Digital agency · Pleasant Ridge, Michigan

Designed and developed for clients including the University of Michigan, Sun Communities, Michigan Science Center, and City of Detroit Land Bank.
Created reusable WordPress theme and plugin architecture that reduced development time by 33%, deployed across 8+ client projects.

May 2015
Jan 2017

Dandelion (DNDLN)

Web Development Manager

Digital agency · Detroit, Michigan

Designed and built the City of Detroit home auction platform end-to-end: $60K project cost, $2M+ in revenue within six months, still operational today.
Delivered the Easter Seals Michigan intranet and training materials, used daily by approximately 500 employees.

Nov 2014
May 2015

Twelve years acrossAI, platform, and human learning.

Engineering, design,and pedagogy asone practice.

Twelve years across
AI, platform, and
human learning.

Engineering, design,
and pedagogy as
one practice.