Daniel Ahn

I build systems, not just screens. What draws me in are the load-bearing parts of a product as well as its seams, where correctness is hardest to hold. TypeScript is where I live, but agentic workflows let me move freely through the backend, the Sui blockchain, or wherever else the work calls for. On my own time I author open-source infrastructure for AI agents and contribute back to the tools I build on.

Gallatin AI — Frontend Engineer

May 2025 to present · On-site, Los Angeles, CA

I work on a real-time platform for planning and tracking the movement of people, equipment, and cargo.

• Designed and wrote the front end for the product’s first AI agent workflow, with typed tool results and deterministic write confirmation putting every action in front of a person before it lands.
• Proposed moving the data layer, the layer every feature sits on, from SWRV to TanStack Query, then to TanStack DB; it was not a trivial migration, so I made the case to my manager and then led it. I am now extending it to local-first operation, so the platform keeps working in the field when the network doesn’t.
• Rebuilt how WebSocket events are owned, batched, and deduplicated, taking a representative save path from 201 requests to 16 and repairing a defect that dropped 29 of 30 events in a burst.
• Created the shared design-system repository and remain its leading contributor, with 60+ components now used across the product, and brought the main end-to-end suite from 28 failures in 42 runs to six consecutive green.

ExploreLearning — Software Engineer

October 2022 to November 2024 · Remote, Charlottesville, VA

I maintained and modernized Gizmos, a library of 550+ interactive math and science simulations for grades 3–12, used by schools across the United States and Canada. I was one of a small frontend team, and the sole dev lead on Gizmos.

• Gizmos was the company’s flagship product.
• I took over a codebase with a two-decade lineage: simulations that began in Macromedia Director and Lingo, were rebuilt for HTML5 by outside contractors, and reached me as pre-ES6 JavaScript on RequireJS with no usable documentation.
• Proposed and led the library’s move off RequireJS and jQuery onto modern JavaScript and Vue 3, rebuilding subsystems as I went.
• Ended a standing external contractor dependency, bringing delivery in house and cutting the bug-fix cycle from weeks to same-day.

Career transition to software engineering

2020 to 2022 · New York, NY

After my MA I kept building on the foundation it gave me, studying modern JavaScript and frontend architecture on my own.

• SweeTrust is trust rails for AI agents, open source on npm at 0.6.0. An agent holds only the authority it was delegated, and what it does leaves a signed record a stranger can verify. Spending caps are counted from that record, so a restart refunds nothing and an agent cannot reset its own budget.
• GitLab: two fixes merged into the GitLab Language Server, the backend for GitLab Duo in IDEs.
• Pinia Colada: three fixes to retries and cache restore, merged by posva, who also wrote Pinia and Vue Router.
• Sui: Thirteen changes merged at MystenLabs, nine of them in its TypeScript and Rust SDKs, among them a fix for a fund-safety bug in DeepBook v3. I also published sui-gas-station, my own transaction-fee sponsorship service.

Every merge and package, with links: Open source.

• MA, Design and Development of Digital Games, Teachers College, Columbia University
• BFA, Illustration, Art Center College of Design
• BS, Neuroscience, Pomona College
• MIT Reality Hack, an XR hackathon: startup track award

Core: TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, React, Pinia, TanStack Query, TanStack DB, Node, HTML, CSS and SCSS, Storybook, Vitest and Playwright.

Agentic engineering: multi-agent orchestration; harness, context, prompt, and memory engineering; spec- and test-driven development; Anthropic, OpenAI and Cursor.

Systems: Move on Sui, Rust, and local-first architecture.

Peninsula Academy — Director and Co-owner

Palos Verdes, CA

I co-owned and ran Peninsula Academy, a K-12 tutoring and test-preparation company in the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the wider South Bay.

• Grew the company to a staff of 25+, and designed the SAT/ACT and college-admissions programs the business was built on.
• Owned P&L, hiring and marketing, and carried the company through a period of expansion to an exit to investors.