Karen Liu

I'm a software engineer with 15+ years of industry experience in front-end web development. My passion is creating beautiful, easy-to-use, reliable interfaces for a variety of industries and applications. Thanks for visiting!

Work Experience

CloudKitchens

Feb 2021 - Apr 2024

This startup is still in stealth mode. I hope to share more details soon!

Zenrez

May 2016 - Dec 2017, Apr 2018 - May 2020

This startup partnered with boutique fitness studios to dynamically price classes and target custom membership offers to their clients.
  • Architected web front-ends for an online booking platform, CRM, targeted email marketing landing pages, and a business dashboard
  • Created a seamless in-iframe purchase flow, allowing users to book with Zenrez without leaving partner studios’ websites. This enabled a Harvard Business School-developed pricing algorithm, increasing average studio revenue by 13%
  • Established engineering best practices, including linting, testing, deployment, URL routing, data fetching/caching, analytics tracking, error monitoring, and bundle late-loading
  • Prototyped a white-labeled React Native Android app for fitness studios

Patreon

Dec 2014 - Mar 2016

  • Led the patron-focused pillar, developing features such as notifications, post comments, search, referral programs, and message inbox
  • Designed a front-end auto-deploy process and created a Chrome extension to aid in debugging production-only issues
  • Built an automated testing framework, including end-to-end smoke tests, to improve release stability

Square

May 2012 - Aug 2014

  • Part of founding team of Square Payroll
  • Tech lead for team of five engineers, driving redesign of merchant dashboard
  • Developed purchase flow for "Business in a Box" hardware

Google

Jul 2010 - May 2012

  • Built the framework and key features for Google+ photo viewer (lightbox)
  • Developed front-end for Google+ Photos settings
  • Led front-end implementation of Google+ Photos redesign as part of a cohesive global revamp

Contract Positions

Empower

Aug 2020 - Dec 2020

  • Built features for the relational organizing mobile app, enabling volunteers to reach out to their personal connections and potential voters (React Native)

Exponent (now Expo)

Jun 2016 - Jul 2016

  • Implemented the redesign of XDE, a Mac developer tool for building and sharing React Native projects

Internships

Amazon

May 2009 - June 2009

  • Analyzed customers in various cohort arrangements to understand usage of the Customer Discussions feature

Oracle

May 2009 - June 2009

  • Features and bug fixes for the Oracle Beehive product

Tools and software

JavaScript frameworks and libraries

React, Apollo GraphQL, Redux, Zustand, React Native, single-spa, Webpack, Node, Cypress/Karma/Jasmine/Mocha, Storybook

Languages

JavaScript/TypeScript, Ruby, Python, Java

Tools and integrations

Figma, git, Mixpanel, Sentry, Stripe, Zapier, Zendesk

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

  • 2006 - 2010
  • B.S. in Computer Science, minor in math
  • GPA: 3.84

Stuyvesant High School

  • 2002 - 2006
  • GPA: 95%

Fun Personal Stuff

Project Links
Pipe Dream clone source code
Slider puzzle solver source code
Vegetarianism slideshow source code
Flickr lightbox source code
Secret Santa source code
Whack-a-mole mobile game source code