ROBERT NIIMISOFTWARE ENGINEER / NYCEmail me
RN / HOME02 EXPERIENCE

My background.

I studied mechanical engineering at Purdue, then moved into software. I've since worked as an engineer and co-founded Plugd and LIQ Auctions.

Robert Niimi

New York, NY | US Citizen
me@robertniimi.com | robertniimi.com
github.com/robertn702 | linkedin.com/in/robertniimi

Summary

Senior full-stack engineer with 10+ years in startups, from employee #1 to founder. I specialize in TypeScript across React, Next.js, and Node.js, with a product and front-end focus. Most recently I have built LLM extraction pipelines, long-running AI agents, browser-integrated agent tooling, and local-first memory.

Experience

Software Engineer, Hanover Park

Dec 2025 - Jul 2026

Hanover Park is an AI-native fund administration platform for private equity and venture capital firms, providing unified fund administration, portfolio intelligence, and AI agents for real-time fund management.

  • Sole engineer for the platform's portfolio monitoring product, owning architecture, front end, back end, and delivery on a full-TypeScript stack (React/Next.js)
  • Automated KPI collection across thousands of portfolio companies, consolidating founder-submitted forms, AI email extraction, and values detected during form ingestion into a unified metrics view
  • Owned and maintained the AI email ingestion pipeline extracting KPI values from unstructured portfolio company communications, using RAG, LLM-based document extraction (Reducto), and long-running agents (Trigger.dev)
  • Built and maintained the firm's internal task management system

Lead Front-End Engineer, Flexa

Aug 2024 - Dec 2025

Flexa is a pure-digital payments network enabling instant cryptocurrency payments at merchants worldwide.

  • Led front-end architecture and development using React, Next.js, and TypeScript for payment infrastructure processing digital asset transactions
  • Architected and maintained the monorepo structure, enabling efficient code sharing and consistent development practices across multiple applications and services
  • Owned end-to-end product experience for Flexa Checkout with Base Pay, Mini Apps, and Payment Page products serving over 40,000 merchant locations
  • Championed company-wide AI adoption, leading the rollout of Claude Code across engineering and delivering internal technical talks on AI-assisted development workflows

Co-Founder & CTO, LIQ Auctions

Jun 2023 - May 2024

LIQ Auctions is a fully on-chain auction protocol and auction house for real-world assets (RWAs). It features instant liquidity for sellers and a bid-to-earn model.

  • Co-developed the Liquid Auction Protocol on EVM-based blockchains
  • Completed Outlier Ventures Polygon Base Camp accelerator program
  • Architected and built the full web application
  • Led UI/UX design

Co-Founder & CEO, Plugd Inc.

Sep 2019 - Jun 2023

  • Led front-end development of the web and mobile apps (React / React Native)
  • Led strategy for growth (>100k app installs)
  • Managed and hired design & engineering contractors
  • Raised Angel / Pre-seed round

Software Engineer, Shōgun (YC W18)

Dec 2018 - May 2019

  • Built reusable React components and page builder elements for the drag-and-drop visual editor

Founder, FareWell for Uber and Lyft

2017 - 2018

Ride sharing comparison mobile application; sole creator through acquisition in 2018

  • Designed, built, and launched application for iOS and Android phones
  • Used React Native along with the Uber/Lyft APIs to seamlessly compare prices and book rides
  • Organically grew user base to over 10,000 monthly users and 50,000 total downloads in 1 year
  • Led acquisition by Bellhop Technologies, DBA Obi

Founding Software Engineer (Employee #1), Engagio

May 2015 - Aug 2017
Engagio was acquired by Demandbase in 2018

  • Co-architected the core web application, designing the frontend state management system on React/Redux patterns in their earliest days (2015)
  • Built many of the product's most visual screens, including analytics dashboards with multiple interactive graphs
  • Architected, built, and managed the company's core React component library and browser extension
  • Created, implemented, and documented front-end best practice standards for the company

Process Engineer, Procter & Gamble

Jul 2013 - Aug 2014

Selected Open Source

Education

Purdue University - West Lafayette

Bachelor's Degree, Mechanical Engineering

Skills

Languages & Frameworks: TypeScript, JavaScript, React.js, Next.js, Node.js, Express.js, React Native
Data & APIs: PostgreSQL, GraphQL, REST APIs
AI: LLM Integration (Anthropic Claude), RAG, AI Agents, MCP (Model Context Protocol), Context Engineering
Other: Web3

PROJECTS AND WRITE-UPSView projects