# Ryan Oillataguerre **Founder** — Los Angeles, CA, United States > 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! Career Archetype: **Launchpad Navigator** (HS-DG) — One of the first Launchpad Navigators on Saywise ## Links - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ryan-oillataguerre ## Experience ### Founder, Executive Director, Breakdown (2026-01 – 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 (2024-05 – 2025-12) 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 (2024-03 – 2024-12) - 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 (2023-08 – 2023-12) 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 ### Senior Software Engineer, Tenet (2022-10 – 2023-08) - Architected and implemented features and improvements across the full stack - Ensured more stable and feature-ful APIs, adding and improving on policy accuracy in the credit decision engine, and ensuring automation was in compliance with state and federal laws and regulations through collaboration with the Risk team - Led a rebuild of the entire Web UX with Next.js and Node - Led and managed a team of 3 engineers (1 Mid, 2 Associates), working directly with stakeholders in Product, Design, Risk, and Compliance to achieve business goals and improve KPIs - Synced regularly with senior management to communicate about priorities, timelines, and team workload management to create a healthy development process with accurate external expectations and efficient implementation - Rebuilt the post-loan booking process where users managed their loans, made payments, and edited their Smart Charging schedule - Worked with Node.js microservices hosted on AWS Lambda through Docker images, as well as a Next.js web application ### Senior Software Engineer, Subject (2021-05 – 2022-10) Beverly Hills, California, United States · - Second Engineer at the company - Architected and built Node.js microservices-based backend to replace Firebase integrations and Cloud Functions architecture from MVP - Adopted and set up Terraform for infrastructure management - Developed integration with Canvas at the API level to manage cross-domain data and user grades, scores, enrollments - Created internal-use admin tools for CRUDing student data, viewing student progress and scores, editing user data, etc. - Investigated and spiked candidate frameworks for a company-wide CMS, built out POCs - Managed, context-transferred, and mentored entry and mid-level engineers - Explored and negotiated deals with SaaS companies (AWS, GCP, Control Plane, Canvas) from our Learning Management System to Cloud Providers - Recruited engineers and management in post-Seed/pre-Series A stage - Seeded fully new tech office in Seattle alongside C-Suite by recruiting and interviewing candidates from Director-level to all levels of tech ICs - Relocated to Seattle to onboard new engineering team with context on existing codebase ### Software Engineer II, Weedmaps (2020-09 – 2021-05) Irvine, California, United States · - Backend Engineer on WM Retail team - Factored out legacy monolith Meteor app into React frontend and Node.js backend service - Built integrations with Metrc (government MJ regulatory firm) API - Built MongoDB aggregations to generate sales and compliance reports for clients using our POS system - Improved custom job architecture that runs on spawned Nodes in Kubernetes cluster for running CPU-intensive processes with Node.js ### Associate Software Engineer, Surfline Wavetrak, Inc. (2018-11 – 2020-09) Huntington Beach, CA · - Built embed generator Lambda function to embed Surfline cameras in partner websites (Forbes, etc.) - Built out Surfline Sessions feature and integrated ML models into the platform through a Sessions API - Detached the head from our Wordpress integration and wrote custom APIs on it to serve through a new React frontend instead of WP templates - Built out new microservices from application code to Terraform infrastructure ### Software Engineering Intern, Surfline Wavetrak, Inc. (2018-09 – 2018-10) Huntington Beach, California ### Software Engineering Intern II, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2015-12 – 2016-05) Los Angeles Metropolitan Area · - Developed software for the management, automation, and testing of a large Angular application and SQL database being used in Computer Aided Engineering ### Teaching Assistant, Department of Computer Science, California State University, Northridge (2015-08 – 2015-12) Los Angeles Metropolitan Area · - Assistant for Computer Science 111/L ## Education ### Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Political Science, Minor in Mathematics, UC Irvine (2014-01 – 2018-01) Activities and societies: Beale & Butterworth Startup Competition Prize Winner UCI Applied Innovation Sigma Alpha Epsilon ## Skills Nonprofit Leadership, Grassroots Fundraising, TypeScript, NATS, NestJS, NextJS, Amazon ECS, Software Infrastructure, Software Design, Meilisearch, Go, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Engineering Management, PHP, Jest, supertest, Point of Sale (POS) Systems, Mongoose ODM, Containerization ## Credentials - **Butterworth Software Development Competition Winner, 2018** — University of California, Irvine (issued 2018-06) - **Neural Networks and Deep Learning** — Coursera (issued 2021-02) --- Source: https://saywise.com/ryanoillataguerre (last modified 2026-09-28T17:59:06.777Z)