Griffin Mahoney
Software Engineer | Technology Leader
About Me
Over the past 20 years, I have worked in nearly every role within the software engineering world. I have always loved building things—whether products, teams, or companies. My passion lies in seeing the results of my efforts, and the efforts of those I work with, come to life and achieve success. In addition to building, I value every opportunity to coach others and to learn from them.
I believe my greatest strength is taking an idea from "0 to 1"—transforming a vague concept or identified opportunity into working software. I am capable of handling or managing the front end, back end, infrastructure, and security. When it comes to choosing technology, I prefer to use proven and well-understood tools rather than chasing what's new and shiny. I also work closely with product vision holders to refine and iterate on their ideas.
When I'm not at "work," you can usually find me tinkering on a side project—either building a solution to a problem I've encountered or putting a new technology through its paces. My side projects have included real-time event detection from security cameras, personal finance apps, organizational tools, RF experiments using SDRs, computer building, home energy monitoring in Grafana, and training new AI models on both personal and public datasets.
Professional Highlights
- Played a key leadership role, both as an executive or founder, in guiding three companies from inception to successful exits.
- Participated in and played a key role in multiple successful fundraising rounds.
- In 2023 I brought a generative AI image app from idea to production. This used a diffusion model which I fine-tuned based on proprietary data. This app saw more than 100,000 uses during the beta launch.
- On multiple occasions I have guided an organization through technical due-diligence, both for investment and for acquisition.
- Founded a company in 2016 as a Technical Co-Founder. I created and launched the initial products of this company which were acquired 2 years later.
Skills
Leadership & Management
AI
Backend
Frontend
DevOps & Tools
Work Experience
VP of Engineering
Yardzen
🎯Acquired by OldCastle (2024)Feb 2021 - Present
Remote
Led the engineering team including core engineering, data science, data engineering. Also acted as a key individual contributor for all aspects of the engineering team.
- Led a hybrid team of onshore and offshore engineers to build a scalable online landscape design platform
- Led the effort to extend the core product to include a marketplace for finding a landscape contractor. This product included all aspects of the relationship from introduction to on platform payments using Stripe Connect
- Developed and implemented an AI powered landscaping design tool that allows users to design their landscape and get a quote for the materials and labor. This tool used a custom diffusion model trained on our existing data.
- Led the engineering team through an acquisition by OldCastle in late 2024
- Acted as a key member of the executive team to steer the company through multiple rounds of funding, growth, shifts, and changes in leadership.
- Developed and implemented an AI powered sales assistant that would analyze calls and provide insights and recommendations to the sales team in near real time.
- Led the effort to migrate yardzen.com from Squarespace to Contentful and NextJS
- Developed and implemented AI agents to streamline back-office operations
- Developed and implemented a custom AI powered chatbot for the customer support team
- Acted as the principal architect and developer of deployment and data infrastructure
CTO
Valor Performance
🎯Acquired by Mursion (2021)Apr 2018 - Feb 2021
Remote
Led cross-functional product and engineering teams through successful acquisition by Mursion. Built a remote executive coaching platform serving coaches, clients, and administrators.
- Led cross-functional product and engineering teams to build a remote executive coaching platform serving coaches, clients, and administrators
- Acted as a principal engineer, contributing heavily to core application code, infrastructure, and feature development across the stack
- Architected and launched a proprietary video conferencing solution tailored for high-performance coaching sessions
- Built an integrated learning management system (LMS) to support custom course creation and progression tracking
- Directed product strategy and execution, translating business needs into scalable technical solutions and coordinating roadmap delivery
Advisor
CoachUp
Nov 2018 - Present
Boston, MA
Provide support and strategic guidance to the CEO and executive team.
Co-Founder/CTO
Athletes of Valor
🎯Acquired by CoachUp (2018)Aug 2016 - Nov 2018
Boston, MA
Co-founded and built full-stack web application as solo engineer, leading to successful acquisition by CoachUp.
- Built and launched full-stack web application as solo engineer using Ruby on Rails, including infrastructure, front end, and back end
- Led technical strategy and product roadmap, defining core features and aligning engineering efforts with business goals
- Co-founded the company and played a key role in capital raising efforts, including investor presentations and pitch refinement
- Won the $50k prize in the competitive MassChallenge startup accelerator, validating business potential and execution strength
Side Projects
An open source PWA note and task management with robust and helpful features
Technologies:
- Full WYSIWYG with custom components
- Full-text search with Typesense
- Robust task management system
- NextJS with React Front End
- Deployed with Docker and K8s
An open source PWA budgeting tool that syncs transactions from the Plaid API and provides helpful insights and reports
Technologies:
- Month over Month reports with category breakdown
- Transaction sorting and filtering
- Budget creation and management
- Transaction and merchant sorting
- Trend reports
- Spending analytics
- Smart categories
- Plaid API integration
- Docker and K8s deployment
Education
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Wentworth Institute of Technology
Aug 2005 - May 2009
Boston, MA