Kayla Cross

Senior Software Engineer · Thea

Arlington, VA·On-site·5 days in office

Thea is an AI learning platform used by millions of learners worldwide across web, iOS, macOS, and Android, with more than 1 billion questions served. I work on a seven-engineer team shipping continuously across Laravel, MySQL, React/TypeScript/Inertia, C#/.NET, and Swift.

• Primary engineering owner for Thea's hybrid iOS and macOS apps, from initial implementation and TestFlight/App Store launch through releases, crash investigations, platform upgrades, and native integrations. iOS now accounts for approximately 40% of product usage and holds a 4.9 rating across 20,000+ App Store ratings; macOS holds a 4.9 rating across 300+ ratings.
• Led the implementation, launch, and production hardening of iOS subscriptions, including StoreKit purchase flows, app/web synchronization, telemetry, error recovery, and edge cases such as parental approval.
• Ship full-stack and AI-powered product features across Laravel/MySQL, React/TypeScript/Inertia, C#/.NET, and Swift, including assignments, class creation and selection, homepage experiments, model-powered checks and translations, and shareable study kits.
• Design mobile-first product experiences and reusable React interactions, while improving security, developer tooling, production visibility, and continuous-delivery workflows.

Full Stack Software Engineer · Koko Labs

Remote·5 days remote

• Built backend systems for Full Sleep, a radar-based sleep tracking device. Java, Dropwizard, and Postgres powered the device fleet and its web and mobile apps.
• Wired Stripe webhooks into the existing signup flow so the company could launch its free-trial program.
• One of three engineers on a hardware-centric product; shipped React/TypeScript/Redux features and helped steer product direction, including a redesign of the admin content system.

Software Engineer IV · Alto Pharmacy

Remote·5 days remote

• Full-stack engineer on clinical, pharmacy, and delivery software at a $1B health-tech company – Ruby on Rails with Sorbet strict typing and Snowflake, in a microservice architecture.
• Shipped provider-facing API features for prior authorization and refill workflows; practiced TDD with RSpec; held on-call with Grafana, New Relic, and AWS.

API Software Engineer · Fundrise

Remote·5 days remote·During the pandemic

• Engineered the quantitative-performance ETL computing investor returns across $2.4B+ on the largest direct-to-investor real estate platform in the US – Spring Batch, Java, Snowflake.
• Redesigned returns to compute daily instead of quarterly by overhauling JDBC and SQL.
• Designed RESTful endpoints and built out monitoring with Swagger, Datadog, and Sentry.

Software Engineer II · Evans and Chambers Technology

Washington, DC·Hybrid·2 days in office, 3 days remote·Some client-site visits in Virginia

• Full-stack Groovy on Grails engineer on a security-clearance management platform serving 1,000+ facilities.
• Drove the move to multi-tenant architecture across Grails, AWS, MySQL, and jQuery, with Geb UI automation guarding the migration; cut task load times 92% through SQL and Hibernate tuning.
• Onboarded a Fortune 500 client by designing and building a custom API integration into their existing software.
• I led intern outreach, assessment, and training, and I received the company-wide Excellence Award in 2019.

Before Engineering · Policy and Research

Washington, DC

• I did analyst and policy work at Hamilton Place Strategies, New America, and the United States Senate, including a method for reading company earnings calls off the Bloomberg Terminal whose findings were cited by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Georgetown University · B.S., Foreign Service

• I focused on technology and media, which included computer science coursework in Ruby and C++.

Flatiron School · Full-Stack Web Development

• I attended on the Women Take Tech scholarship from the Kode with Klossy foundation.