chas@macbook:~$ whoami
Chas Bean
➤ Full-Stack & AI Engineer · ex-CTO · Ferndale, MI · Open to Remote Roles
chas@macbook:~$ cat summary.txt
Full-stack engineer and former startup CTO with 10+ years taking products from zero to scale at venture-backed startups. I build developer platforms and full-stack products — APIs, SDKs, and agentic systems — end to end, from design through infra; most recently an autonomous SaaS negotiation agent. Happiest building ethical products with small, high-trust teams.
chas@macbook:~$ cat experience.md
Vertice (acquired Vendr) :: Senior Software Engineer II
# Series B AI-powered SaaS pricing & negotiation — $216M raised, ~$30M ARR; ~400 orgs; acquired May 2026.
- Co-owned the real-time agentic backend powering Ruth, Vendr's autonomous negotiation agent — a streaming LLM service serving 5K MAU and ~60K LLM calls/mo, with history, document extraction, and resumable sessions, plus tracing and evals.
- Solo-architected the full-stack multiplayer chat system for running autonomous negotiations end-to-end with Ruth — coordinating 4 agents over a canonical append-only event timeline with point-in-time, VFS-backed memory.
- Co-built a published SDK, public pricing APIs (OpenAPI), and an MCP server that let partners like Zip and TrustRadius embed Vendr's pricing intelligence into their products — 3.1M requests/mo at a 57ms p50, 2.7M MCP events/mo.
- Cut per-turn LLM cost by 65% across 3B tokens/mo — optimizing tool-call chains, payloads, encodings, prompt caching, and hot-path queries — holding spend to ~$8K/mo.
- Designed and built an integrations foundation that ingests documents in real time to surface savings and trigger renewals — shipping file storage connectors with Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box.
- Single-handedly built a Honey-style Chrome extension that detects SaaS vendor sites and surfaces Vendr's pricing savings & insights on-page — adopted by 500+ users across orgs.
- Provide first-class support and data requests for customers, including Anthropic, Brex, Duolingo, Grammarly, Gong, TIME, Twilio, through the Vendr→Vertice acquisition.
Toucan (acquired by Babbel) :: Senior Software Engineer II
# Series A language-learning browser extension — $30M raised; 1.5M+ downloads, 12 languages, featured by Google and Microsoft.
- Shipped browser-extension features delivering 2B+ in-context language lessons to ~1M users.
- Built A/B-tested monetization features that lifted conversion 33% in one month.
Plain Sight :: Chief Technology Officer
# Seed-funded in-person networking app — $2M raised; featured on Product Hunt and the Apple App Store.
- Owned technical direction as CTO — led 3 engineers plus contractors, ran white-glove email & push marketing campaigns, and personally hosted the in-person meetups the product was built around.
- Steered the company through 2 full pivots in 3 years — from geofenced in-person networking, to a remote social feed when COVID hit, to an in-person events & ticketing platform.
- Built and shipped the web + mobile apps end-to-end with automated CI/CD and release monitoring — a 99.27% crash-free rate over 200+ releases to 10k+ users.
- Delivered 20+ production features — Stripe payments, ticketing & check-ins, real-time push, search, and recommendations — with end-to-end test coverage.
IndustryStar :: Senior Software Engineer
# Supply-chain management platform at a self-funded startup (2nd engineering hire).
- Led front-end development as the 2nd engineering hire — driving a full rewrite that cut duplicated/dead code by 30%+ — and shaped product direction across release estimates, vision, and UX.
- Shipped full-stack features end-to-end — real-time collaborative spreadsheets, supplier search, templated emails, and subscriptions — and redesigned the REST API architecture.
- Mentored and recruited junior engineers and interns.
chas@macbook:~$ rg '^\w+:' skills/
languages:
TypeScript · GraphQL
frameworks:
React · React Native · Remix · Node.js · Tailwind
tools:
Bun · Vite · Playwright
cloud:
CDK · SST · Lambda · ECS · S3 · SQS · EventBridge · GitHub Actions
realtime:
SSE · WSS · web streams · Redis
ai:
MCP · AI SDK · LLMs · prompting · OpenRouter · evals · agent memory
databases:
PostgreSQL · Prisma · pgboss
services:
Stripe · Metronome · Clerk · Segment · Sentry · Braintrust · Zuplo
chas@macbook:~$ cat education.txt
B.S. Computer Science & Engineering @ Michigan State University
Linguistics cognate · 2+ yrs volunteer NLP research on topic evolution across forum threads.
chas@macbook:~$ mail -s "let's build something" charlesparkerbean@gmail.com