Cole Berman

Everything below is true, which, if you arrived from slider position five, may come as a relief.

Take the PDF. It's the calm version.

Summary

Full stack software engineer, 4 years production TypeScript/React: customer-facing apps, Postgres-backed services, payment infrastructure, authenticated cross-company integrations. Co-founder and lead engineer of a live subscription platform where LLM agents, safety guardrails, versioned context management, and token cost tracking are part of the daily build loop.

Experience

Aardvark Co-Founder and Lead Software Engineer

Jun 2025 – Present
  • Founded and built a creator affiliate platform end to end: Next.js/React/TypeScript web app, Postgres + Supabase backend with row-level security, Chrome Manifest V3 extension, all in production for paying subscribers.
  • Bidirectional partner integration with a separate company: encrypted JWE handoff tokens, shared-secret authenticated webhooks both directions, idempotent signup callbacks, structured event logging.
  • Owns production Stripe billing pipeline (checkout, subscription lifecycle webhooks, promo pricing). Traced and fixed a revenue-affecting cancellation bug from permission-scoped writes failing silently.
  • Reusable internal AI tooling: agent skills encoding golden-path patterns with hard guardrails (no prod pushes, no schema migrations, no destructive DB calls), blast-radius review, independent diff verification.
  • Daily LLM engineering: versioned context/memory docs, token and cost tracking, output evaluation before merge, MCP integrations to analytics/deploy/data systems.

Pekin Insurance Full Stack Software Engineer

Mar 2023 – May 2025
  • Founding engineer on MyPI, ground-up rebuild of the claims platform: auto/home/medical/life policyholder portals in React/TypeScript against Java REST API + PostgreSQL; team of 5 engineers, 2 designers.
  • Sensitive records for tens of thousands of policyholders; partnered with security team on PII handling for every feature.
  • Built internal identity-resolution tool: LexisNexis verification, scored each registration/claim against ~5,000–10,000 records to flag duplicates across name/address changes.
  • Defined platform infra requirements (AWS S3, legacy data migration with parity validation); maintained dev/test/prod environments; Jest tests covering every component.
  • Founding columnist for Digital Digest internal newsletter: seasonal recipes + technical humor.

Freelance Full Stack Developer

Oct 2022 – Mar 2023
  • Full stack apps for small-business clients: React over Express/Node/PostgreSQL; simplified data access so owners could self-maintain content.

Skills

  • Languages: TypeScript 5.9, JavaScript (ES2024), Java, SQL, HTML5, CSS
  • Frontend: React 19, Next.js 15 (App Router, RSC, Server Actions), React Native, Redux, Tailwind CSS 4, Framer Motion, Chrome Extensions (Manifest V3)
  • Backend/Data: Node.js 20, Express, PostgreSQL, Supabase (Auth, RLS, Edge Functions, Storage), REST APIs, webhooks, Sequelize
  • AI/LLM: Claude and OpenAI APIs, agentic workflows, MCP server integrations, prompt/context engineering, retrieval over structured data, agent guardrail design, output evaluation, token/cost tracking
  • Platform: Stripe billing, JWE/JOSE token encryption, structured event logging, PostHog, AWS S3, Vercel, Jest, Git, Agile, TDD

Education

  • Fullstack Academy Software Engineering Immersive, Full Stack JavaScriptSept 2022
  • University of Colorado Boulder B.A. Political ScienceMay 2020

All verified. Too calm? The slider misses you.