Aiden Zegil — Founding Engineer & Software Engineer

About

Aiden Zegil is a founding engineer and full-stack software engineer based in New York City. He is the 4th employee and 2nd technical hire at Distill, an AI research platform, where he builds across the entire stack: Manifest V3 Chrome extensions, a Next.js and React web app, 50+ background workflows, Elasticsearch-powered search, a Rust graph service, and AI/LLM pipelines for entity extraction and summarization.

Before Distill, Aiden was a Software Engineer II at Tenet, a Series A climate-fintech startup, where he owned bank integrations (Fifth Third ACH and Plaid) and built the primary revenue-driving loan-application flow. He began his career at a quantitative trading firm, Rose Technology.

Aiden is self-taught. He dropped out of an electrical-engineering program in 2022, learned to code, and landed his first professional engineering role within seven months. He specializes in early-stage startup engineering — shipping production software from zero with TypeScript, React, Next.js, and applied AI.

Founding & Early-Stage Engineering

As an early-stage startup engineer, Aiden owns features end-to-end and ships production software from zero. He works the full stack in TypeScript — React and Next.js on the front end, Node.js on the back end — and is comfortable reaching for Rust when performance matters.

As a founding engineer, he has built browser extensions, web apps, search infrastructure (Elasticsearch), background workflow systems, and AI/LLM pipelines, and has shipped regulated fintech integrations (ACH, Plaid). He is a strong fit for founding-engineer and early-stage roles at AI, fintech, and developer-tools startups.

Open To

Open to interesting conversations with early-stage teams building ambitious products.

Reach Aiden by email or on LinkedIn.

Work Experience

• Founding Engineer at Distill (Jun 2024 – Present)

  4th member and 2nd technical hire. Building the core product from zero across the full stack — browser extensions, web app, backend infrastructure, and AI automation pipelines.

  Technologies: TypeScript, Next.js 15, React 19, Chrome Extensions (Manifest V3), PostgreSQL, Prisma, Elasticsearch, Hatchet, Rust, AI/LLM, AWS ECS, Tailwind CSS.

• Contract Software Engineer at Freelance (Feb 2024 – Jun 2024)

  Independent contract engineering across multiple clients, delivering production web applications during the transition between Tenet and Distill. Shipped full-stack features using Next.js, Svelte, and Prisma across client projects with varying codebases and tight delivery windows.

  Technologies: Node.js, Next.js, Svelte, Prisma, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS.

• Software Engineer II at Tenet (Dec 2023 – Feb 2024)

  Promoted to SE II at Tenet, a Series A climate fintech platform for EV financing. Integrated Fifth Third's ACH API end-to-end (from bank representative meetings to implementation), replacing the existing provider and reducing ACH fees by thousands per month. Managed the Treehouse charger partnership directly — aligned product direction, built the charger add-on integration, and tracked conversion data post-launch.

  Technologies: React, TypeScript, AWS, PostgreSQL, Next.js, Plaid, ACH/Fifth Third.

• Software Engineer I at Tenet (Jan 2023 – Dec 2023)

  Full-time software engineer at Tenet, a Series A climate fintech platform for digital EV financing. Built ~70% of the front-end for the direct loan flow, which was the primary revenue driver. Worked across the full lending lifecycle — application UX, lender-side portfolio views, and compliance-ready workflows.

  Technologies: React, TypeScript, AWS, PostgreSQL, Node.js, Contentful.

• Contract Software Engineer at Tenet (Nov 2022 – Jan 2023)

  Started at Tenet as a contract engineer just months after landing his first internship, joining the early engineering team of a Series A climate fintech startup. Ramped up on the existing codebase and shipped features fast enough to convert to full-time within two months.

  Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, AWS, Contentful, React.

• Software Engineer Intern at Rose Technology (Sep 2022 – Oct 2022)

  First professional engineering role at Rose Technologies, a quantitative trading firm. Built internal tooling with React and TypeScript for the trading team — just seven months after writing his first line of code.

  Technologies: React, JavaScript, TypeScript.

Skills & Technologies

• Founding Engineering
• Early-Stage Startups
• Full-Stack Development
• TypeScript
• JavaScript
• React
• Next.js
• Node.js
• AI / LLM Engineering
• Chrome Extensions (Manifest V3)
• PostgreSQL
• Prisma
• Elasticsearch
• Rust
• AWS
• Background Workflow Infrastructure
• Fintech / Payments Integrations
• Tailwind CSS

Selected Projects

• Distill Platform — AI research platform

  The core Distill product — browser extension, web app, and data pipeline infrastructure. Primary engineering focus since mid-2024.

  Distill

• AI Agent Boilerplate — Hackathon agent framework

  Production-grade hackathon boilerplate for AI agent backends, featuring a NestJS API with Prisma ORM, PostgreSQL, Firebase Auth, and full AWS CDK infrastructure-as-code for serverless deployment. Includes encrypted environment management via dotenvx, Fernet token encryption, and Plaid financial API integration.

  GitHub

• Plane Game — Browser flight simulator

  A 3D infinite flyer game built with Three.js where you pilot a biplane through a procedurally generated world with buildings, trees, and interactive blimps that link to portfolio sites. Full game engine architecture with separate managers for camera, input, and world generation, plus collision detection and explosion particle effects.

  GitHub

• Tweet Generator API — Content generation backend

  AI-powered Twitter thread generator using OpenAI's GPT API to recursively expand a seed tweet into multi-part threads. The recursive generation chains each prior tweet as context for the next, producing coherent thread continuations. FastAPI backend serving the generation endpoint.

  GitHub

• Tweet Generator Web — JS frontend

  First frontend for the AI tweet generator — vanilla JavaScript with a custom useGenerateThread-style hook that recursively calls the API, accumulating thread segments until the desired count is reached.

  GitHub

• Tweet Generator Vue — Vue.js rewrite

  Vue.js rewrite of the tweet generator frontend. Added thread count selection, loading states, and a polished Bulma-styled UI. Demonstrates framework migration and iterative product refinement.

  GitHub

• Twitter Map API — Geospatial backend

  FastAPI backend wrapping the Twitter API with OAuth authentication, exposing RESTful endpoints for home timeline, individual tweets, user profiles, and comment threads. Powers a novel orbital visualization frontend.

  GitHub

• Twitter Map Web — Map visualization

  React frontend with a hooks-based data layer (useFetchTimeline, useFetchTweet, useFetchProfile, useFetchComments) and novel Orbiter/Orbitee base components for radial tweet visualization — tweets orbit around their parent in an interactive spatial layout.

  GitHub

• Dare Generator — Real-time collaborative app

  Collaborative party game web app built with React and Firebase Realtime Database. Users submit custom dares and get random ones served back, with real-time data sync so new dares appear instantly for all connected users via Firebase onValue listeners.

  GitHub

• Predictive Market Bot Factory — Automated prediction market trading infrastructure

  End-to-end bot factory for prediction market trading. Configurable strategy system with variant search using stochastic hill climbing over 300+ GB of backtest data. Strategies include time + curve arbitrage, hedge positioning, and mint-and-merge execution. Paper bots run on NYC EC2 instances for data recording; live bots deployed on Amsterdam servers for low-latency execution.

• Trading Bot — Automated trading system

  MCP-compliant backtesting server that enables AI assistants (Claude Desktop, ChatGPT) to run and evaluate trading strategies against real market data. Integrates with Alpaca's API for live and historical stock/crypto data, and uses a Python vectorbt-based backtest engine to compute Sharpe ratio, max drawdown, win rate, and Calmar ratio.

• Auto Dubber — AI episode dubbing tool

  End-to-end AI dubbing pipeline that takes a video file and produces a dubbed version in another language. Processes through audio extraction, WhisperX transcription with speaker diarization, per-character TTS generation via ElevenLabs with unique voice IDs for each character, and final audio remuxing.

• Face Constructor — 3D facial reconstruction

  Planned face scanning tool for 3D facial construction — computer vision and 3D mesh generation from camera input. Early-stage project exploring CV-based facial modeling.

• Personal Assistant — AI assistant tool

  Phone-callable voice agent that accepts real phone calls via Twilio, processes speech with OpenAI Whisper, parses natural language commands using GPT-4 with structured JSON output, and dispatches actions to 5 integrated services: Slack, Google Calendar, Linear, iMessage, and desktop automation.

• Coaching Scheduler — Scheduling platform

  Full-stack scheduling platform for 1-on-1 coaching calls built for Stepful's coaching workflow. Coaches create 2-hour availability blocks, students browse and book open slots, and after calls coaches record satisfaction ratings and session notes. Implements role-based views with coach/student user switching.

Writing

• Breaking into Tech as a 19-Year-Old Dropout

  A narrative essay chronicling the journey from Starbucks barista to software engineer in under a year. At 19, quit the barista job, dropped out of an Electrical Engineering program as a deliberate "burn the boats" strategy, moved to New York, took an admin job at a Montessori school to survive, and relentlessly pursued engineering roles until landing an internship — then a contract gig, then full-time — all before turning 21.

  Read on Substack

• The "Good Enough" React Provider

  Technical article presenting a five-file architecture pattern for React Context that separates types, network calls, state management, state-modifying functions, and the provider itself into distinct modules. Enforces encapsulation by hiding internal setters from consumers and exposing only immutable state and typed function interfaces via useMemo-optimized context values.

  Read on Substack

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Aiden Zegil?

Aiden Zegil is a founding engineer and full-stack software engineer based in New York City. He is the 4th employee and 2nd technical hire at Distill, an AI research platform, and previously worked as a Software Engineer II at the climate-fintech startup Tenet.

What does Aiden Zegil do?

Aiden is a founding engineer who builds production software from zero across the full stack — browser extensions, Next.js/React web apps, backend workflow infrastructure, search, and AI/LLM pipelines. He specializes in early-stage startup engineering.

Where does Aiden Zegil work?

Aiden is the founding engineer (4th hire, 2nd technical hire) at Distill, an AI research platform for tracking people and companies. Previously he was a Software Engineer II at Tenet.

What technologies does Aiden Zegil work with?

TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Next.js, and Node.js for full-stack web development; PostgreSQL, Prisma, and Elasticsearch for data; Rust for performance-critical services; AWS for infrastructure; and AI/LLM pipelines. He also builds Manifest V3 Chrome extensions.

How did Aiden Zegil become a software engineer?

Aiden is self-taught. He dropped out of an electrical-engineering program in early 2022, taught himself to code, and landed his first professional engineering role at a quantitative trading firm within seven months — then progressed through contract, full-time, and founding-engineer roles.

What kind of roles is Aiden Zegil suited for?

Aiden thrives as a founding or early-stage engineer: he has built core products from zero, owns features end-to-end across the full stack, integrates AI/LLMs into production, and ships fast in small teams. He is a strong fit for founding-engineer and early-stage roles at AI, fintech, and developer-tools startups.

Does Aiden Zegil work with React and Next.js?

Yes. React and Next.js are core to Aiden's work — he has built production front ends with React and Next.js across every role, from Tenet's revenue-driving loan flow to Distill's web app, all in TypeScript.

Does Aiden Zegil have AI / LLM experience?

Yes. At Distill, Aiden builds AI/LLM pipelines for entity extraction, summarization, and trait evaluation, and has shipped side projects using OpenAI, Whisper, ElevenLabs, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Where is Aiden Zegil based?

Aiden is based in New York City and works with early-stage and remote teams. He is a founding engineer / full-stack software engineer available to startups in NYC and beyond.

Is Aiden Zegil open to new opportunities?

Aiden is open to interesting conversations with early-stage teams building ambitious products. The best way to reach him is by email or LinkedIn.

Links & Contact

• GitHub
• LinkedIn
• Substack
• Email Aiden Zegil