SIDDHARTH S. JHA

SINCE Mar 2023

Fractional Product Designer+Engineer

Plot Network Inc. (dba Press & Plot)

Fractional design-oriented product generalist. Heavy focus on designing new features and redesigning existing ones. Working directly with product owners to distill customer needs and shape product strategy. Hands-on manager of one. Strong HTML, CSS & Python coding skills. Uniquely positioned to leverage LLM technologies.

Select Clients

> Power supply technology co
Designed consumer app for charging EVs, charger management dashboard for station owners and UX for charging kiosk. 30-year-old company with commercial real estate AUM over $1bn.
> insurance tech startup
Redesigned online product offering. This startup was part of Y Combinator Winter 2022 batch.
> Online Retailer
Shaped & prototyped (in low fidelity) a digital version of popular language learning flashcards for children.

Sep 2019—Dec 2022

Founder & Product Generalist

Plot Network Inc.

Took Plot from an idea into a consumer product: tool to build resumes for nonlinear career paths. Later, pivoted to a two-sided hiring app for blue-collar industry.

A side product that emerged: WhoThis, a link-in-bio app for creators. Initial pre-Covid product ('19-'20): social journal and maps focused on recommendations.

Sep 2017—May 2019

Academic Sabbatical

University of Surrey (Guildford, UK)

18-month academic sabbatical in southeast England. Took courses across engineering, business & arts.

> Blocdoc
Wrote a paper on future of documents and document management systems as year-long research project. Built Blocdoc, a novel block-based fluid document editor with transclusion, collaboration and in-built templates for various use cases. Work inspired by Douglas Engelbart's research from 1950s.

2013-2017

Co-founder & Product Engineer

Mesh8 Inc.

Built & shipped consumer internet products to the web and App Store: social networking apps around shared interests and close friends; a used goods marketplace built atop twitter; location-based link sharing; an email productivity plugin. Other projects: a messaging "super app".

2012-2013

UX Developer

Self-employed

Shipped consumer internet software including a location-based mobile photo messaging app (like geocaching with friends), a web-based private journal, and a messaging service for people to text local businesses. Also built HTML5 & CSS3 applications for clients.

2008-2011

Software Developer Intern / Co-op

> Offerpop Inc. (dba Wyng Inc.)2011
Built early features of marketing software that powered ad campaigns of Fortune 500, including Audi's Superbowl campaign. Also created a popular app on the Facebook platform that reached over 200k MAUs.
> Research In Motion Inc.2009
Built consumer social networking apps in BlackBerry's Software R&D Prototype Group. Wrote an innovative power management algorithm.
> RBC2008
Wrote QA / automated testing software for banking products used by millions of Canadians.

Academics & Certifications

> University of Waterloo

Foundations of Large Language Models, Dec 2024

Professional Certification in transformer architectures and ML techniques, with hands-on experience building RAG systems using open-source LLMs and applying model optimization methods.
> University of Surrey
Computer science. Global Graduate Award in German.
> University of Waterloo
Software engineering & computer science.