NOINDEX
Tech Lead, Engineer, & More

Ryuhei Yokokawa

High-output Staff Engineer specializing in frontend architecture, state management, and AI-assisted development workflows. Founder experience with a focus on building products that matter.

Experience

  • Staff Engineer - Tech Lead

    Brightwheel
    Nov 2022 — Present

    3 years

    • Provide technical leadership to cross-functional teams at early childhood education platform serving tens of thousands of schools nationwide
    • Lead R&D for OCR/Multi-modal LLM parser from concept to production, conducting evals and prompt engineering
    • Led development of Onboarding and Learning Platform systems, at times leading a team of 7 engineers for rapid parallelization
    • Lead project planning and introduced better ticket/work organization for improved team output/efficiency

  • Technical Lead & Sr. Engineer

    Glowforge Inc
    June 2020 — Nov 2022

    2.5 years

    • Led UK direct-to-consumer launch with cross-functional team, handling internationalization and data backfill
    • Led performance optimization reducing LCP from 4s to 2.5s (50% speed improvement)
    • Designed and implemented A/B testing system for marketing campaigns
    • Provided technical leadership and mentorship to cross-functional teams

  • Founder / Engineer

    Y-Designs, Inc
    Sept 2010 — Jan 2020

    4 person digital agency | 10 years

    • Founded digital agency specializing in rapid prototyping and MVP development
    • Managed concurrent projects across industries (social networks, blockchain, media, e-commerce)
    • Grew revenue 10x from year 1 to year 6
    • Led development of anonymous social network (Sondry) and video rendering platform (MinMax)
Skills

Professional

Technical Leadership Software Development Project Management Product Development Spec Creation Agile/Waterfall UI/UX Design

Languages / Frameworks

JavaScript/TypeScript React/Next.js/GraphQL Node.js/Express HTML/CSS/SCSS Rails/Ruby/SQL Python/LangChain

Tools / Services

Claude Code/Cursor/Antigravity AWS/GCP/Kubernetes Terraform/Helm SQL/NoSQL/Redis Git/CI/CD Analytics/Metabase
Education

  • Whitman College

    B.A. Astronomy-Geology Combined
    May 2008
    • Bachelor's degree in the sciences.
    • Thesis included software and data analysis.
    • Created multiple web apps for the college during summer internships.