Résumé
Andrew Fribush
Director of Engineering, Abstract · AI, commerce & data infrastructure
Software engineer with fifteen years shipping production systems across banks, ecommerce, healthcare, fintech, and AI infrastructure. First paid to write code in high school; first language was C. Now leading a production AI practice at Abstract, speech and audio intelligence, RAG, computer vision, and LLM orchestration with compliance controls, after leading the Shopify Plus teams it grew from. A decade of founding companies and shipping for banks and institutions before that.
Experience
Abstract
Austin, TX / Remote
Director of Engineering
2023–Present
- Led the firm’s pivot from Shopify and ecommerce architecture into a production AI practice; own engagements end to end, from wireframes to deployment. Second-ranked engineer, reporting to the CEO.
- FINCA International audio intelligence (microfinance, 20+ markets): built a pipeline that turns thousands of hours of field interviews across 4 countries and 6 languages from weeks of listening into answers in seconds, Flask/Celery/Redis async processing, pyannote diarization, Whisper variants (incl. a Bantu fine-tune for Luganda), and Gemini/OpenAI theme extraction with structured-output normalization.
- ALL-SAFE surgical-training assessment: designed the agentic automation scaffolding for trainee evaluation, won the Global Surgical Training Challenge $700K grand prize, deployed across 3 countries. Plus Saatva customer intelligence over calls, chat, reviews, and tickets.
- Standing stack: speech and audio AI, RAG retrieval, LLM orchestration with compliance controls (PII tokenization, audit trails), computer vision, and predictive modeling. Production on AWS, integrated with Salesforce and Snowflake.
Lead Engineer
2022–2023
- Led Shopify Plus engineering teams for brands scaling seven to nine figures. Architected the Pat McGrath Labs replatform (billion-dollar beauty brand) with VTO, dynamic merchandising, and product-drop automation.
- Rebuilt Credo Beauty end to end (ERP → storefront) and launched a mobile app that scaled 0 → $5M+/yr (+44% BFCM revenue). Built Steele Canvas’s custom ERP with real-time inventory (+43% site speed, +20% conversions).
- Designed the headless Shopify storefront for Eleven Madison Park, a custom AR “Try in Your Space” feature for Jonathan Adler, CellCosmet’s multi-region setup with geo-routing and per-region compliance, and subscription-first rebuilds and clienteling for Kitty Poo Club and Temple St. Clair.
Delmar Vacations
Technical Lead · Senior Engineer
2018–2022
- Built a custom commerce-and-service engine for the vacation-rental business. Scaled infrastructure more than 10x through the 2020 demand spike while cutting per-booking unit cost.
- Migrated the storefront off WooCommerce/WordPress, then integrated the fulfillment and service stack end to end.
Fribush Technology
Founder
2015–Present
- Independent engineering studio, 100+ shipped projects across web, mobile, and desktop, leading small teams to deliver on time and on budget.
- Currently building a suite of public-data APIs that turn US federal datasets into MCP servers and REST APIs: 40+ data products, 443 MCP tools, 313 REST routes, and 2,000+ generated pages on a shared corpus framework.
Cameral
Founder
2017–Present
- Civic-tech web application integrating dozens of APIs and running analysis over a billion-plus data points to help candidates and advocacy groups organize and campaign.
MemoryWell
Co-founder & CTO
2016–17
- Built Rails and WordPress products for institutional customers; drove 87% of total revenue through direct sales and grants. Won the WeWork Creator Award ($130k).
Lucolo
Co-founder & CTO
2015–16
- Built sales, email, and AI software, including a new protocol, bundled into a SaaS product. Secured corporate partners, the largest of which was Moo.
Bank of America
Software Engineer I & II
2014–2016
- Built fraud-detection systems, payment-security tooling, ACH core integrations, and APIs for financial-data processing, plus risk-assessment models and automated compliance reporting.
Eastern Bank
Software Engineer
2014
- Internal skunkworks team with direct access to the banking core, shipping work that landed in both internal and customer-facing applications.
Indiana Chamber of Commerce
Data & Business Analyst
2011–14
- Ran analysis on civil projects, tax rates, budget allocation, infrastructure spend, and authored an economic-development report that went before the governor.
Additional & public-sector work
Additional engagements with Deloitte and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and subcontracted public-sector work: judicial software for the State of New Jersey’s tax-appeals system, a foreign-aid visibility project for the State Department, and engineering for the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense.
Selected work
Skills
Languages
AI & ML
Frontend
Backend & data
Commerce
Infra & compliance
Education
University of Notre Dame
BA, Mathematics and Political Science (2014), Dean’s List 2012–14, Technology Commissioner, IT Support Manager.
Harvard University
Business Core Fundamentals (2018), graduated with honors.
Johns Hopkins University
Data Science certification (2013), R, databases, advanced statistics.
Honors
- WeWork Creator Award, $130k grant for most promising startup, DC
- Global Surgical Training Challenge, $700K grand prize (ALL-SAFE)
- HMH Idea Hack, 1st place of 42 teams
- Startup Weekend, placed in 14, won 5, Chicago to Boston to DC
- Fellowships, Parallel18 (Puerto Rico), Halcyon (DC), Vetscape