GradientMy top selected projects over 2 years at Gradient. I led the pivot to a robotics-manufactured product line after building most of the robotics and data layer underneath it. I’m not just an individual contributor, but a strong leader of engineers as well.
Leading the Website Buildout
Our old site was failing under millions of SKUs. I led the design and build of its replacement.
- $102Kin 7 weeks
- 4,055paid orders
Leading the pivot
Out of consignment and into repacks, with three months of runway left.
- $2M/yrlosses on the old model
- 20%margin after pivot
Demoing to eBay
Presented the robotics division to eBay's CFO, Head of Collectibles USA, and four other senior executives.
Sorting robot
The machine the pivot depended on. Sorts on price, team, player, or anything else the catalogue knows.
- 1,500cards / hr
Building the Data Backbone
Forty Docker nodes, a data lake, and a parser. The whole company's data operation.
- 40nodes in parallel
- 20-100/spages scraped
The Pricing Database
This simple yet reliable system was the foundation for all pricing at Gradient.
- 40Mrows
Sync architecture
Postcard: a template for ETL nodes that moved data between every system we ran.
- 1000/son some nodes
- 99.9%+uptime
Scanning robots
Eight machines imaging cards at 520 ppi.
- 2,000cards / hr, one machine
- 520 ppicapture
The LLM Identification Pipeline
Identifies a card from its scan against a catalogue of millions.
- 99.98%accuracy on Pokémon
- 4.1/squeries
Inventory system
The system of record for every card in the building, down to its position in a stack.
- 2.5Mcards per aisle
Calibration and cropping
Aligning two cameras to the scanner frame, and the classical cropper built on top of it.
- 95%crop success
- 0.2sinference
Prototype machines
Three pick-and-place robots I built to find the patterns worth committing to.
- 3robots
- 6 weeksstart to finish