Chengyin Liu

Seasoned software builder, team leader, and company founder.

Experience

Co-founder/CTO at Slab Jun 2017 — Dec 2023

Co-founded company with investment from Matrix Partners, CRV, and NEA.
Achieved profitability with multi-million dollar ARR, serving notable clients such as Asana, Ramp, Fivetran with full company adoption.
Led and recruited teams across Engineering (1 Manager, 7 Senior+ Engineers), Support (1 Lead, 2 Specialists), and Recruiting (2 Recruiters).
Directed technical strategy in a React, GraphQL, Elixir, Postgres, GCP stack with a frontend focus.
Developed the initial Slab product, including a CMS with flexible membership, permission and organization features, a real-time editor, search system, admin tools, integration system with 50+ partners, import/export, marketing site with blogging system, etc.

Senior Software Engineer at Airbnb Apr 2016 — Jun 2017

Spearheaded the early full-stack team for Airbnb Plus during its inception.
Directed the company-wide Swift 2 to 3 migration in collaboration with the Apple Swift team.
Engineered the host calendar and stats feature with rich interactions and charts using React Native for cross-platform app support.

Lead Software Engineer at Place / Backplane Feb 2012 — Apr 2016

Led the frontend team for a social media platform, serving high-profile clients such as Lady Gaga, Coca-Cola, and MLBPA.
Architected through multiple major iterations of product designs and technology stacks.

Early Career

Software Engineer Intern at WePay Jul 2011 — Sep 2011

Designed and implemented a store that is embeddable in any page, which made to the TechCrunch and drew 300 new sellers for WePay on the launch day alone.

Software Engineer Intern at Wandoujia May 2010 — July 2010

Built a dashboard using HTML, CSS and JavaScript as the front-end developer for Wandoujia, the missing managing software for Android phones.

Personal Projects

AI Changelog Jun 2024 — Present

With the power of AI, generate product changelogs from GitHub issues, pull requests and commits.

WhatFont Apr 2011 — Present

A browser extension for inspecting typography designs.
Serving 3-million weekly users.

Archived Projects

WhatFont App: Same WhatFont experience, now available on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.
Bamboo App and Extension: Save and share web highlights through Bamboo's iOS App, Chrome extension and Safari extension.
AlbumColors.js: Create a color pallete from an image in JavaScript. Inspired by iTunes 11's album view.
Earth Pulse: Track earthquakes with social media.
UIUC CS 473 Grader Helper: A Python script to help CS 473 UIUC grader smoothen the grading process by auto handling homework files.
UIUC Course Open API: Provide an open API for UIUC hackers as an infrastructure to build UIUC hacks.
Innovation Works Website: Built the official website for the most important Chinese tech incubator.

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Class of Winter 2011

Bachelor of Computer Science