Jason
Jason Karuza is a software engineer that graduated from UCLA with Bachelor (2004) and Master (2005) of Science Degrees in Computer Science. Jason also has certificates in Systems Engineering from Cal Tech (2010), Aerospace Engineering from UCLA (2010), and Business Leadership and Management from USC (2011). He has worked as an engineer in industry since 2006 with a focus on quality software design, architecture, development, leadership, and fostering growth of other engineers. After joining an EdTech startup in 2012 (Engrade), it was acquired by McGraw-Hill Education in 2014.
Jason spent five years as the Director of Engineering for multiple engineering teams within MHE, helping define and implement effective processes, hire over twenty engineers at varying seniority levels, lead a migration to docker-based development and subsequent switch to AWS (from bare metal) and Kubernetes for infrastructure management. He helped grow engineers into team leaders and managers, drove cross-team integrations (across timezones), and yielded many new products and experiences for customers around the world.
In late 2019, Jason left McGraw-Hill to join a startup based out of Palo Alto called Hourly. His role as Senior Principal Engineer within the 12-engineer team was to focus on hiring backend engineers, scaling the team through empowering processes, and producing software for new small business customers in an effort to grow Hourly’s business toward IPO/acquisition/etc.
In late 2020, Jason joined Teampay, a distributed spend management fintech startup based in NYC as the engineering manager and interim VP of engineering. There, Jason managed 13 full-time frontend, backend, full stack, devops, and data science engineers, the AWS infrastructure, and a number of contracting teams to continue growing the company’s customer base, engineering team, and product offerings.
In July 2022, Jason began as a Senior Manager of Product Engineering at Afresh, managing a team of 10 iOS and Typescript/GraphQL engineers responsible for building and maintaining the in-store ordering experience for grocery store department managers in chains such as Albertsons, Stater Brothers, Winco Foods, 99 Cents Only, and Smart and Final. This team was also responsible for system performance, an ETL pipeline utilizing dbt, instrumentation, and other facets of the Machine Learning-driven platform.
On the side, Jason develops websites for private clients, creates mobile apps using Flutter, develops Samsung SmartThings/SleepNumber integrations, and continues to refine his technical and interpersonal skills as a leader and engineer in a variety of organizations.