Carter Appleton

Carter Appleton

Staff Engineer Seattle Resume

I taught myself programming the night Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. My very first language was Objective-C, objectively a bizarre language to start with. Fifteen years later I'm still drawn to the same thing: taking complex frontier technology and making it work for everyone.

Right now I'm exploring different areas to find out what I want to work on next. When I'm not coding I'm baking, backcountry skiing, or watching terrible movies.

I'm always up for a conversation with people building something interesting. Say hello.

Work

  1. '26
    Neynar
    Staff Engineer
    Scaled onchain wallet infrastructure for the Farcaster social network. Evolved Clanker, the onchain token launcher I helped build, for emerging US legal frameworks.
    stayed through two acquisitions
  2. '25 – '26
    Farcaster
    Staff Engineer · Acquired by Neynar
    Designed a new onchain presale mechanism for community funding.
  3. '25 – '26
    Clanker
    Founding Engineer · Acquired by Farcaster, then Neynar
    Owned backend, frontend, SDK, and data pipeline at a 4-person startup. Tens of thousands of tokens deployed daily, millions of hits/day, $10M+ ARR. Designed an early AI-native SDK; mentored teams through the acquisition. Four portfolio projects raised venture funding in the first year.
    more detail
    • Owned backend, frontend, SDK, and data pipeline at our 4-person startup
    • System deployed tens of thousands of tokens daily, serving millions of hits/day
    • Designed SDK for developers and LLMs, focusing on ease of use; an early AI-native API
    • Designed and shipped LLM agent with tool-use and a custom multi-model router to handle user queries
    • Built Rust library for fast and efficient deterministic onchain address generation
    • Ran weekly developer office hours and integrated direct feedback into the product
    • Mentored team members on system design and shipping under acquisition pressure; authored the internal doc that drove our acquisition
    • Four portfolio companies launched via Clanker raised venture funding in the first year
  4. '22 – '25
    Warbler Labs
    Staff Engineer
    Lab behind Goldfinch and Heron Finance. Tech lead on a team of 5. Shipped a $30M smart contract system, the first production passkey wallets, a portfolio optimizer over 10k assets, and a pipeline that ingests hundreds of companies' complex financial reports and normalizes them losslessly. Mentored three engineers to promotion.
    more detail
    • Lab behind Goldfinch (onchain real-world asset platform) and Heron Finance (private market investment platform)
    • Tech lead on a team of 5; drove technical architecture for backend and smart contracts
    • Led engineering of a $30M smart contract system in Solidity, generating 10%+ yield
    • Built the first production use of account-abstracted crypto wallets, holding over $30M
    • Built a pipeline ingesting hundreds of companies' complex financial reports and normalizing them losslessly
    • Built linear programming rebalancing engine optimizing portfolios across thousands of performing assets
    • Mentored three engineers to promotion (one to Senior, two to Staff)
  5. '16 – '21
    Airbnb
    Engineer → Senior → Staff
    Architected the customer-service chatbot and led the 10-person cross-functional team that built it, whose NLP resolutions cut overall CX contacts by ~3%. Two months after launch, COVID hit and every US reservation got canceled at once, and I finally got to test the 10× load every engineer is supposed to plan for. It held. I also ran the release manager rotation and gave internal talks on deploy observability, watching metrics move as your code ships. Co-invented a patented NLP sentiment system along the way.
    more detail
    • Architected and led cross-functional team of 10 building the customer service chatbot, whose NLP resolutions cut overall CX contacts by ~3%
    • Chatbot launched two months before COVID and handled 100x surge when all US reservations were canceled
    • Served on the release manager rotation gating releases and verifying builds; ran talks on deploy observability, watching metrics move as your code ships
    • Built multilingual contact flow and CMS knowledge base for customer support
    • Co-invented NLP sentiment analysis system (US Patent)
    • Built taxonomy system to optimize CX agent workflows
    • Mentored junior engineers across multiple teams
    • Started and ran the Seattle office internship program
  6. '11 – '17
    Cat Facts
    Founder · Sold
    The internet-famous texting service that ranked #1 on Google for "cat facts." Tens of thousands of subscribers, millions of impressions/year, 30% viral rate. Wrote a word-weight classifier for auto-responses before LLMs existed.
    more detail
    • The internet-famous Cat Facts texting service, ranked #1 on Google for "cat facts"
    • Tens of thousands of customers and millions of impressions annually; 30% viral rate
    • Ran marketing campaigns across Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, analyzing post effectiveness
    • Automated customer interactions with a custom NLP system before LLMs existed
  7. '15 – '16
    Microsoft
    Software Engineer
  8. '11 – '15
    Carnegie Mellon
    BS, Computer Science
  9. '09 – '13
    iOS Developer
    Founder
    Four puzzle games. The hit one got 30k downloads, almost all in China, with fan mail in Mandarin asking for more levels.
    more detail
    • Puzzle games with 100k+ downloads
    • Top app got 30k downloads, primarily in China
  10. summer '14
    Microsoft
    Intern
  11. summer '13
    Microsoft
    Intern
  12. summer '12
    Motion Math
    Intern

What I've shipped

10s of millions
people used products I built
$30M
smart contract assets secured
100×
traffic surge held at Airbnb
5
engineers mentored to promotion
$10M+
ARR at Clanker, team of 4
1
US patent (it's a fun read)

Recent writing

All writing

Guilty pleasures

currently into

Thanks for stopping by. I'm always up for a good conversation, say hello or read something I wrote.