Résumé
Andrew Fribush
Engineering director, founder & CTO · AI, commerce & data infrastructure
Consequential systems where software meets institutions, shipped since 2008: more than seventy named engagements across banks, ecommerce, healthcare, fintech, and AI infrastructure. A software and computer engineer: first paid to write code in high school; first language was C. Ran Abstract's production AI practice as Director of Engineering through 2026 (speech and audio intelligence, RAG, computer vision, LLM orchestration with compliance controls) after leading the Shopify Plus teams it grew from. A decade of founding companies and shipping for banks and institutions before that. Takes engagements: fractional technical leadership, production AI systems, expert consulting, or the right full-time role.
Experience
Abstract
Austin, TX / Remote
Director of Engineering
2023–2026
- Led the firm's pivot from Shopify and ecommerce architecture into a production AI practice; owned engagements end to end, from wireframes to deployment, reporting to the CEO and directing an independent engineering team that ranged from himself alone to 27 people at peak (engineers plus PMs and support roles) across the AI client roster, with an annual engineering budget that ran to $3.3M.
- FINCA International audio intelligence (a global microfinance nonprofit; this project spanned 4 countries and 6 languages): built a pipeline that turns thousands of hours of field interviews from weeks of manual listening into retrievable, structured findings, Flask/Celery/Redis async processing, pyannote diarization, Whisper variants (incl. a Bantu fine-tune for Luganda), and Gemini/OpenAI theme extraction with structured-output normalization.
- ALL-SAFE surgical-training assessment: designed the agentic automation scaffolding for trainee evaluation on the platform that won the Global Surgical Training Challenge $700,000 grand prize (January 2023), deployed across 3 countries over the 2023–2026 engagement. Plus Saatva customer intelligence over calls, chat, reviews, and tickets, and NeuroPraxis, a native iOS healthtech app.
- Rebuilt Credo Beauty end to end (ERP → storefront) and launched a mobile app that scaled 0 → $5M+/yr (+44% BFCM revenue). Shipped CellCosmet's multi-region Shopify setup with geo-routing and per-region compliance (2024–25). Built Steele Canvas’s custom ERP with real-time inventory (+43% site speed, +20% conversions).
- Standing stack: speech and audio AI, RAG retrieval, LLM orchestration with compliance controls (PII tokenization, audit trails), computer vision, and predictive modeling. Production on AWS, integrated with Salesforce and Snowflake.
Lead Engineer
2022–2023
- Led Shopify Plus engineering teams for brands scaling seven to nine figures. Architected the Pat McGrath Labs replatform (for a billion-dollar beauty brand, 2022–2023) with VTO, dynamic merchandising, and product-drop automation.
- Rebuilt commerce foundations for brands scaling seven to nine figures, with subscription-first rebuilds and clienteling for Temple St. Clair.
- Designed the headless Shopify storefront for Eleven Madison Park and a custom AR “Try in Your Space” feature for Jonathan Adler.
Del Mar Vacations
Senior Engineer → Technical Lead
2019–2022
- Built a custom commerce-and-service engine for the vacation-rental business. Scaled infrastructure more than 10x through the 2020 demand spike while cutting per-booking unit cost. Shipped connected home-monitoring IoT devices — a digital twin of each property, tracking house systems like water pressure — and a React Native field-service app (iOS + Android) used by on-site pros: handymen, plumbers, landscapers.
- Migrated the storefront off WooCommerce/WordPress, then integrated the fulfillment and service stack end to end.
- Began as an Upwork engagement — $325K across 2,845 individually tracked hours — before converting to a full-time role.
Fribush Technology
Founder
2008–Present
- Freelancing from 2008, a formal studio since ~2015: 100+ shipped projects across web, mobile, and desktop, leading small teams to deliver on time and on budget. $4.27M in lifetime personal contract earnings; on Upwork alone, Expert-Vetted (top 1% of freelancers) with $500K+ across 27 contracts at a near-uniform 5.0.
- Currently building a suite of public-data APIs that turn US federal datasets into MCP servers and REST APIs: 40+ data products, 443 MCP tools, 313 REST routes, and 2,000+ generated pages on a shared corpus framework.
Cameral
Founder
2017–Present
- Civic-tech web application integrating dozens of APIs and running analysis over a billion-plus data points to help candidates and advocacy groups organize and campaign.
MemoryWell
Co-founder & CTO
2016–17
- Built Rails and WordPress products for institutional customers; drove 87% of total revenue through direct sales and grants. Won the inaugural WeWork Creator Awards ($130,000, 2017).
Lucolo
Co-founder & CTO
2016
- Engaged first as a contract engineer in 2015, then joined as co-founder & CTO. Built sales, email, and AI software, including a new protocol, bundled into a SaaS product. Secured corporate partners, the largest of which was Moo.
Bank of America
Software Engineer I & II
2014–2015
- Built fraud-detection systems, payment-security tooling, ACH core integrations, and APIs for financial-data processing, plus risk-assessment models and automated compliance reporting.
Eastern Bank
Software Engineer
2014
- Internal skunkworks team with direct access to the banking core, shipping work that landed in both internal and customer-facing applications.
Indiana Chamber of Commerce
Data & Business Analyst
2011–14
- Ran analysis on civil projects, tax rates, budget allocation, infrastructure spend, and authored an economic-development report that went before the governor.
Additional & public-sector work
Additional engagements with Deloitte and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and subcontracted public-sector work: judicial software for the State of New Jersey’s tax-appeals system, a foreign-aid visibility project for the State Department, and engineering for the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense.
Selected work
Skills
Languages
AI & ML
Frontend
Backend & data
Commerce
Infra & compliance
Education
University of Notre Dame
BA, Mathematics and Political Science (2014), Dean’s List 2012–14, Technology Commissioner, IT Support Manager.
Certificates
Harvard Business School Online
CORe (Credential of Readiness) certificate, Pass with Honors (2018).
Johns Hopkins University
Data Science certificate (2014), R, databases, advanced statistics.
Honors
- Global Surgical Training Challenge, $700,000 grand prize (ALL-SAFE, January 2023; Andrew engaged 2023–2026)
- Inaugural WeWork Creator Awards, $130,000 grant for most promising startup — Washington, DC (2017)
- HMH Idea Hack, 1st place of 42 teams
- Startup Weekend, placed in 14, won 5, Chicago to Boston to DC
- Fellowships and accelerator programs: Parallel18 Gen 4 (Puerto Rico, 2017–18), Halcyon Incubator (Washington, DC, Cohort 6, 2016–17), Vetscape (2016).