Scott Erickson

Building new products end-to-end and advising teams on reliable, agent-assisted software development.

• Built and open-sourced a production web framework designed for agentic coding (docs.saf-demo.online): self-contained, feature-complete, and structured so coding agents produce consistent results. Used it to build the three products below.
• Created a workflow harness that drives coding agents through templated, validated steps to generate routine code reliably (workflows.saf-demo.online).
• Cofounded and built three products from the ground up: Family Caller (automated check-ins for people in cognitive decline, alerting caregivers), Power Asset Exchange (gas turbine parts marketplace for utilities), and Case Daemon (automated USCIS form filling for immigration lawyers).
• Proposed, built, and delivered evaluations under paid contract with the UK AI Security Institute (AISI), measuring the ability of agents to escape sandboxes and apply for jobs.
• Brought in by an acquired startup, tasked with modernizing its new parent company's legacy systems, after breakages in a heavily agent-generated codebase had cost it pilot customers. Delivered focused reliability fixes, introduced observability tooling, and established safer practices for working with agentic tools.
• Unblocked a healthcare benefits administration platform's Playwright adoption by decoupling tests from a shared user account on a single instance, enabling a safe product launch.
• Write about these experiences at blog.scotterickson.info.

Lead role managing concurrent tiger-teams of 4-6 engineers, while focused on new platforms and better architecture.

• Led tiger team to create prototype for running web code natively on desktop, resolving long-standing disputes and unblocking development of code-sharing platform, resulting in increased product value and faster iteration on desktop.
• Successfully overhauled and reorganized code for the web, implementing new frameworks, resolving web-vital performance issues and resulting in enhanced developer velocity.
• Drove migrations across organizations, in particular adopting best tools and practices in frontend web development for performance, reliability, observability, portability, and developer velocity. This included React-Query, Jotai, a universal logging client, Sentry, and a custom-extended React-Router for modular development.
• Designed a 3rd party connector service to power Dropbox's new AI-focused Dash product. As part of this, laid out a plan to build off and evolve our existing 3rd party ecosystem platform.
• Engineering Interview Question Lead, recruiting and encouraging engineers across the company to write and improve interview question bank in service to career framework and evolving business needs, including hiring for AI expertise.
• Received the highest possible rating in most recent 360-review, for scope, impact, and quality of contributions to Dropbox.

Gained valuable experience as Technical Lead on multiple growth and new-platform teams for a range of web, desktop, and server-side features, including multi-faceted and business-critical features.

• Designed and strategized a plan for 8 engineers to build a host of services to integrate with 3rd party platforms for Dropbox's transition to an AI-first company.
• Worked as an early adopter of new Revenue APIs and libraries, providing feedback to those developers.
• Discovered disparate expectations, leading to a multi-year process of reworking and adopting the new platform, by being an early adopter of the APIs, resulting in cost-saving and critical improvements for the business.
• Designed and lead early development of an ad system and a workflow engine.
• Owned and drove site performance initiatives, including working closely with the platform team owning the APIs.

CodeCombat teaches students around the world to code by using Python and JavaScript to control fantasy characters in puzzles and battles. I led initiatives to modernize the codebase, including moving from callbacks to Promises with yield and from Backbone.js and mediator events to Vue.js and Vuex, improving developer velocity and reducing bugs.

• Defined the product by experimenting with different user demographics and game mechanics.
• Extended product with classroom edition, adding classroom management, licensing, and professional development features.
• Ran product team, managed team members and process.
• Owned, maintained, documented and improved AWS infrastructure and MongoDB clusters.
• Designed coding exercises and screened dozens of engineers.
• Built educational coding game, frontend and backend, including game graphics, level versioning, and various editors, enabling rapid prototyping and extensive open-source contributions.

Skritter teaches the roughly two thousand Chinese and Japanese characters needed for literacy, combining stroke recognition with immediate feedback and a spaced repetition system that tracks what a student knows and when to review. I built the site, frontend and backend, including review scheduling, study page, and vocabulary list management.

• Developed the iOS application, which doubled revenue.
• Significantly improved product via iterative processes, including running UX tests, updating and adding features, and setting up subscription payments, making the company self-sustaining.
• Filled multiple roles, including sysadmin, customer support, salesperson, accountant, and chef.
• Built a product development team of 9, continuing to advise them as they grew the company and expanded the product.