Ryan Oillataguerre

Los Angeles, CA, United States0

Founder at Breakdown

The average American can name their senators but not a single bill those senators voted on last month, and I'm trying to fix that. Breakdown is a free, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) that shows you what Congress is actually doing day-to-day, and whether your representatives vote the way you would. Every bill gets a plain-English summary. You vote on it yourself. You can see your alignment score against your senators' and representative's real recorded votes, bill by bill. Most civic tech tells people to care more, and feels like an uphill battle against our news media. Breakdown assumes they already do, and that the real barrier is legibility. A 900-page appropriations bill is not a document anyone was meant to read. Breakdown is live on iOS and web (Android coming soon!) with hundreds of users, and retention that tells me the product works. No ads, no paywall, no partisan tilt - by design and by charter. I'm now raising philanthropic funding to take Breakdown to scale, and am always happy to talk with people building in civic tech, democracy, or public-interest AI. If that's you, reach out!

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Experience

Founder, Executive Director

Breakdown

Jan 2026 — Present · Los Angeles, California, United States

Breakdown is a 501(c)(3) civic-tech nonprofit building the infrastructure to close the information gap between Americans and Congress. Our iOS app uses AI to make legislation readable, lets you vote on real bills moving through Congress, and shows you exactly how much you agree with your elected representatives — turning passive citizenship into an active feedback loop. We pull live data from Congress, summarize bills using tailored LLMs, and give voters a direct, nonpartisan channel to understand what their government is actually doing and communicate their beliefs to their Congressmen and Senators. If you care about democratic accountability, civic technology, or building tools that make government more transparent — I'd love to hear from you. We're actively seeking grants, donations, and partners who want to help scale Breakdown.

Senior Software Engineer

Ghost

May 2024 — Dec 2025 · Los Angeles, California, United States

- Improved product match algorithm (unstructured data matched to a UPC) success from 8% to 60%, recognized as the best-in-class product matching system in the market (using LLM API calls under the hood for key subjective decisions in the process) - Directly influenced strategic shifts in the 2025 roadmap and resource allocation toward a marketplace data-oriented model. - Product owner for external marketplace data integrations, enhancing pricing and purchasing decisions for sellers and buyers. - Dockerized the local dev environment for all engineers at Ghost (better reflects deployed environment app behavior). - Currently managing a team of 2 engineers specifically focused on ingesting and interpreting external marketplace data. - Architected and implemented a greenfield microservice architecture using NATS for service-to-service communication and Jetstream for async processing, to replace unreliable Redis, bullmq-based job runners. - Built a resale profitability calculator for any item on our site. Save our Amazon buyers hours/days of effort verifying profitability. - Established CI integration testing using ephemeral containerized databases and infra like Postgres, NATS to test against.

Software Engineering Consultant

Stealth Startup

Mar 2024 — Dec 2024

- Matured a seed-stage startup's stack from scripts and manual deploys to containerized services, CI/CD pipelines, and a much cleaner database schema for the app's functionality - Set up ETL to pull from larger, less structured data sources and pre-ETL'd data - Added features and functionality to the app by supporting any API-side requirements

Chief Technology Officer

Judie AI

Aug 2023 — Dec 2023 · Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

Cofounded and built Judie AI, a tutoring chat bot that tailors itself to users' levels of knowledge and understanding. - Raised Private funding, hired a software engineer and a Machine Learning Engineer - Met with potential clients, digested user feedback into UX improvements and changes, and participated in meetings directly with schools and districts across the country - Worked with CAIO (Chief AI Officer) to improve the quality of responses in our chat bot, using Pinecone vector database for context, OpenAI Whisper model for Speech to Text, ElevenLabs for Text to Speech - Built a multi-tenant system (and admin experience) for clients (Schools and Districts) to invite, manage users, and view student chats - Subscription, rate limiting, and payment flow with a Stripe integration with webhooks and in-site payment pages - Node.js and Python microservice-based backend, with gRPC for communication - Created a fully Terraform-based infrastructure on GCP, using Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, Networking, and Cloud SQL - Created CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions and Workload Identity Federation on GCP