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Ronn Tan. Software Engineer & Founder.

I build AI products with the backend depth to make them reliable. Right now I’m shipping Appraiso — an iOS app that turns a camera photo into a credible market price — after 13+ years architecting data systems at PeekYou.

Open to senior, staff, and founding engineer roles Currently Building Appraiso — AI appraisal and market pricing for iOS
New York City hi@ronn.dev LinkedIn Résumé GitHub
01 / About

I’m strongest where product, AI, and infrastructure overlap: turning messy real-world data into fast, reliable software people can actually use. My background is deep backend work — search, data pipelines, caching, APIs, and production systems that have to stay up.

For 13+ years I helped build and scale PeekYou, then moved into founder mode with Appraiso: a camera-first iOS app for identifying physical items and estimating real market value across 100+ marketplaces. I like owning the whole path from idea to architecture to shipped product.

13+
Years building
production systems at scale
100M+
Records served
across MongoDB & MySQL
100+
Marketplaces
aggregated by Appraiso
1
Solo founder
shipped end-to-end on iOS
02 / Featured Work

Products and systems with real operational depth.

Coming soon · 2025 → Launching soon

Appraiso

Camera-first AI appraisal and market pricing for iOS

Snap a photo, identify the item, and get a defensible price range from 100+ retail and resale sources. Appraiso is the product layer on top of a broader identification, pricing, and marketplace-intelligence engine.

  • Combines Gemini vision, marketplace sold comps, retail waterfalls, and outlier filtering into one pricing flow.
  • Uses Redis, MongoDB, canonical keys, and vector similarity so repeat appraisals are fast and cheaper to serve.
  • Ships as a real iOS product — SwiftUI, Core ML, subscriptions, affiliate monetization, and App Store readiness.
  • Designed to become a reusable engine for adjacent verticals like fashion, collectibles, watches, and resale.
SwiftUICore MLNext.jsGeminiRedisMongoDBVector SearchRailwayCloudflare R2StoreKit 2
Shipped · Apr 2012 → Jan 2026

PeekYou

People-search platform and data infrastructure at scale

Thirteen-plus years building the systems behind a high-scale people-search platform: ingestion, search, APIs, infrastructure, internal tooling, and the operational work that keeps large datasets useful.

  • Helped evolve the platform from legacy infrastructure into a cloud-backed architecture on AWS.
  • Worked across MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, queues, APIs, and background workers supporting large search workloads.
  • Built user-facing portals and internal tools for data aggregation, search, and dataset management.
  • Owned production reliability and performance in an environment serving millions of daily queries.
PythonPHPNode.jsMongoDBMySQLRedisAWS LambdaEC2S3Nginx
04 / Experience

From high-scale platforms to founder-led product work.

  1. Founder & Software Engineer · Appraiso LLC

    Jun 2025 — Present
    New York City
    • Own product, engineering, infrastructure, monetization, and launch planning as a solo founder.
    • Turn ambiguous product questions — pricing confidence, marketplace coverage, image quality, repeat lookup behavior — into concrete system design decisions.
    • Balance mobile UX, AI accuracy, scraping reliability, cache strategy, and cost controls across one end-to-end product surface.
    • Built the foundation for a reusable appraisal engine instead of a one-off app, so new verticals can reuse the same core pipeline.

  2. Lead / Senior Full Stack Engineer · PeekYou

    Apr 2012 — Jan 2026 · 13 yrs 10 mos
    New York City
    • Grew from junior engineer into a lead role with ownership across backend architecture, data systems, internal tooling, and production operations.
    • Led a zero-downtime migration of the production platform from on-prem infrastructure to AWS while keeping live traffic flowing.
    • Made pragmatic architecture decisions across MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, queues, APIs, and background workers for a large search workload.
    • Partnered with product and business stakeholders to turn data quality, reliability, and performance needs into maintainable systems.
    • Stayed close to production: monitoring, debugging, scaling, incident response, and the small operational details that keep systems healthy.
05 / Stack

The tools I use to ship the full stack.

Languages

  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • Node.js
  • Swift
  • PHP

Frameworks

  • Next.js
  • SwiftUI
  • React
  • Laravel

Data & Storage

  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • MySQL
  • Vector Search
  • Embeddings

Cloud & Infra

  • AWS (Lambda, EC2, S3)
  • Railway
  • Nginx
  • Cloudflare
  • Docker
  • CI/CD

AI & ML

  • Gemini API
  • Core ML
  • Computer Vision
  • LLM Integration
  • Embeddings
  • Web Scraping

System Design

  • Distributed Systems
  • API Design
  • Caching Strategies
  • Event-Driven Architecture
  • Performance Tuning
06 / Let's build

Need a senior builder who can move from product idea to production system?

I’m open to senior, staff, and founding engineer conversations — especially where AI, data, search, or infrastructure need to become a usable product. NYC preferred; remote works for the right team.

hi@ronn.dev Résumé Connect on LinkedIn GitHub