Mingjie Jiang
Building education at Recess (recess.gg)
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
Founding Engineer
2023 - Current
Recess is where homeschooling kids make friends, get inspired, and design their own education. I built the earliest iterations of the Recess web platform with Svelte & Fastify (among other modern tools), designed delightful voice/video experiences for kids, teachers, and parents, and built intuitive, reusable UI components for complex interactions. I optimized onboarding flows for better conversion, and developed AI-driven safeguards to protect kids across all of our social features—all while making the internet a safer, more enriching place for young learners.
Founding Product Engineer
2021 - 2023
Built the core web platform for Ender, a competition-based platform where kids get rewarded to explore their creativity and build real portfolios of projects and skills. I built the platform with a TypeScript/Next.js/GraphQL stack, created reusable design system components with Tailwind and Radix UI, and designed delightful user experiences with Framer Motion. I also help established a quality-driven engineering culture in the engineering org.
Product Engineer
2023 - 2023
Laid out the foundations of Commsor's new platform Matcha, a connections-building social platform for professionals (formerly Meetsy). Guided the team primarily on their adoption and conversion to Next.js App Router, including modernization improvements across the entire stack, as well as implementation of a design system and high-quality reusable components.
Commsor is your community operating system. Unlock insights, measure impact, and build a community-led company.
Raised $66,000,000.00 from Andreas Klinger, Neel Mehta, Slack Fund, Philip Sheibley, Nisha Baxi, AAFM, Des Traynor, Daria Byrne, Colin Kennedy and Kiren Srinivasan.
Executive Director
2021 - 2022
Cal Hacks is a nonprofit organization composed of UC Berkeley students passionate about fostering a culture of hacking, entrepreneurship, and social good via technology.
Director
2021 - 2021
Helped organize Cal Hacks 8.0, our first offline-focused hybrid event. Contributed mostly to hacker experiences, diversity, and workshops.
Cal Hacks is a group of UC Berkeley students that organize hackathon & other educational computer science related events.
Program Manager, Init
2021 - 2022
Helping CS students at underrepresented & underfunded colleges make their first contributions in the open-source community.
Program Manager, Labs
2020 - 2021
CodeDay Labs is a 100% virtual internship program for everyone. Through this virtual internship experience, the student participants will have had their first sustained hands-on experience of working with an industry professional. Students will learn from the industry volunteer: project management, teamwork, communications, modern technical skills, and standard industry practices. I help the program search for mentors, resources, and do research to enture a successful summer for our students and partners.
Regional Manager, DC
2017 - 2020
Managed and hosted DC's most friendly 24-hour coding event, hosting 300+ high schoolers over 4 seasons in Virginia, Gaithersburg, and Fairfax. Students attended various workshops to learn about computer science in a friendly and inviting way, and all our attendees produced well-polished projects. Over 3 seasons of events, over 70 projects are created, and 45+ of them are created by beginners who came to the event with no coding experience at all.
Director Of Technology
2020 - 2021
I work with leadership to create and maintain technical solutions to power the growing global network of female/non-binary students interested in STEM. I helped the organization set up servers for their seasonal competitions, perform maintenance on their forum for students, and I also created Infinity, an open-source, traffic-friendly and deployment-ready puzzle hunt platform for their puzzle hunt competitions.
Co-Founder
2019 - 2021
Execute Big is a minimal & transparent student-run organization founded to enable all students to experience and explore computer science education.
Organizing Advisor
2019 - 2019
Advise current student organizers of the Hack Cincinnati, Cincinnati's largest high-school hackathon, on marketing, logistics, and fundraising strategies.
Technical Staff
2017 - 2018
Managed Chinese social media, coordinated volunteers, worked with human resources and developed technical projects.