Bobby Yang

§About04

I'm Gaoqing. Most people call me Bobby, partly because Gaoqing is hard for native English speakers to pronounce and partly because I got tired of correcting them.

I write software for a living and have for about a decade now. I also fly a 1969 Beechcraft Debonair around the southeast, run a small flock of sheep on a piece of land in West Virginia, and keep a few cars in the garage that are old enough to need actual maintenance instead of a subscription.

People sometimes ask how all of that connects. The honest answer is that I just like making things that work. Software, an old engine, a sick animal, a flight plan. They all want roughly the same thing from you, which is to pay attention and not lie to yourself about what is actually happening. I am usually pretty bad at this and getting slowly less bad over time, which is what most of this site ends up being a record of.

Work

  • Belo LabsFounder

    Lewisburg, WV

    Operating three products for industries tech tends to skip: ranching, GA maintenance, ski crews.

    • Built and shipped Stockaid (livestock management for sale barns) end-to-end as the only engineer
    • Built and shipped Airworthy (AI-driven aircraft maintenance) including a FastAPI backend and a Python pipeline that ingests FAA and OEM data
    • Shipped Schuss to the App Store: a SwiftUI iOS app for ski crews
    • Three live products, paying customers in three different verticals, single founder

  • Shield AIStaff Software Engineer

    Remote

    Contract role on the ground control software for autonomous drones.

    • Refactored an Electron/React prototype into a production Linux + Windows ground station shipping to active drone operators
    • Wrote the DTED elevation-conflict engine for mission planning and in-flight terrain checks
    • Used the refactored codebase to spin up a proof-of-concept for a separate CUI program in under a month

  • RivianStaff Software Engineer

    Palo Alto, CA

    Consumer-facing platforms during Rivian's launch and ramp.

    • Launched the order and preorder system still in production (React, Node, GraphQL, AWS/Kubernetes)
    • Architected the vehicle photo pipeline generating hundreds of thousands of configuration-specific images via Kubernetes jobs + SQS
    • Built the on-demand photo service that serves millions of vehicle images daily across configurator, mobile, and marketing surfaces
    • Owned the cross-team GraphQL backend layer used by multiple product teams
    • Held 99.9% uptime across owned services

  • BlitzInterim Director of Engineering

    Los Angeles, CA

    Ran engineering through 3x DAU growth on a gaming overlay app.

    • Led team through scale from 400k → 1.2M DAU in a few months
    • Owned architecture, code review, and the development process across an Electron/React app with Python, Node, and C++ services
    • Wrote C and C++ Node addons for the low-level in-game overlay
    • Led the Enterprise product line end to end

  • Wonder WorkshopSenior Software Engineer

    San Francisco Bay Area

    Apps for educational robots across web, Windows, and Chromebook.

    • Shipped the first Windows 10 and Chromebook apps for the robots (React/Redux frontend, Scala + Node backend)
    • Grew installed base to 250k monthly active devices and 1M user sessions a month
    • Appointed lead of app analytics by senior management
    • Containerized backend services and migrated to AWS ECS

  • Android AuthoritySenior Software Engineer

    San Francisco Bay Area

    Built the engineering team and platformized the publisher network.

    • Built the engineering team from zero, including hiring, agile dev flow, and code review standards
    • Platformized the site suite into microservices so plugins could be reused across properties
    • Built the backend services still powering the reviews platform
    • Cut page load 30% with a custom ad-loading system

  • GoogleSenior Frontend Developer

    San Francisco Bay Area

    Frontend across DoubleClick and Toontastic.

    • Built marketing landing pages for DoubleClick that generated thousands of dollars in attributable revenue
    • Integrated web components in Toontastic before they were widely adopted
    • Worked inside Google's frontend review culture; took the bar back out with me

  • FacebookSenior Frontend Developer

    San Francisco Bay Area

    Built internet.org from scratch, shipped in 11 languages.

    • Built internet.org from the ground up (React initially, migrated to CMS for editorial workflow)
    • Localized the site to 11 languages, including right-to-left
    • Cut page load 50% to support low-end Android and feature phones in target markets
    • Reached 1M page views per day

  • NinjaTrader GroupSoftware Engineer

    Greater Denver Area

    First industry role. Custom trading algorithms for corporate clients.

    • Built custom trading algorithms for corporate clients
    • Wrote generic trading scripts shipped on a bimonthly OEM cadence