Accomplishments

Bench Accounting Team Automate

Solely responsible for designing and implementing a backend service that enriches transactions with merchant details using LLMs and a retrieval-augmented generations architecture. By surfacing this information in our internal tools using micro-frontends, saved each human specialist 2.4 hours/day of work and, as a result, around $14,500 per month.

Developed LLM-based categorization assistant to guide customers through categorizing according to tax rules, which auto-categorized 230,000 transactions using customer conversations within 3 months, equivalent to ~30,000 months of human bookkeeping or 37% of the work done by specialized human teams in the same period.

Wrote a Python backend using Lambda, API Gateway, and React micro-frontends to surface groups of similar uncategorized transactions to customers, enabling them to auto-categorize in groups. This feature increased the manual categorization rate by 55% upon deployment, saving the business the equivalent of ~110 workdays per month in manual human bookkeeping and $22,600 per month.

Trained and deployed per-client models to categorize transactions that other categorization models cannot recognize. Raised the auto-categorization rate by 30%, with 98% accuracy, saving the business ~53 days of work per month previously performed by human bookkeepers within two months, equivalent to a cost saving of $10,500 monthly.

Earned Bench's Impact Award, celebrating "outstanding performance" and making a "huge impact toward achieving our mission".

Bench Accounting Team Initialize

Streamlined sign-up and onboarding funnel, resulting in a 56% increase in new customers opting into Plaid integrations. Found opportunities to perform client GraphQL queries 64% faster, saving 1500ms from LCP in our onboarding flow.

Contributed to overhauling the client app using React.js, delivering improved performance, better accessibility practices, and a better UX to 25,000+ customers.

Implemented a redesign of the customer cancellation flow, reducing churn rate by 18% in our first month and saving ~$17,000 per month.

cohabit.homes Solo maker

Built application making it easy to plan, manage, and execute a professional home cleaning list.

Bench Accounting Training Team

Created a communication training program for bookkeepers that outperformed learner-reported quality metrics by 24%.

Various organizations

Lived in and led outdoor mountain trekking, canoeing, and climbing programs for youth on five continents.

Survival Academy, UAE Founding team

Launched a new survival school in Ras al Khaimah in collaboration with the government tourism authority.

Planned, bolted, and provided first-year instruction for at-height elements and overnight programs.

YMCA-YWCA of Winnipeg Wilderness Program Department

Managed a team of 20, overseeing complex logistics of 30 deep-wilderness programs covering over 100 weeks of outdoor tripping.

Zeal Adventure Founding instructor team

Involved in building a new adventure travel company during its first three years of operation. Learned a lot from the businesses failure.

Institute of Outdoor Learning

Earned the Accredited Practitioner status and Professional in Outdoor Learning designation.

Mountain Training Association

Awarded the Mountain Leader and Rock Climbing Instructor qualifications 10 years below the average award earner age.

Department of Education

Qualified as a teacher in the UK with a first-class PGDE.