LindseyRenken

Professional Experience

1. #1 · Mar 2021 – Present

   Airheart

   Technical Founder

   Airheart is a travel platform, with three products launching on it. Atlas is a travel agent on staff: it plans a trip, books it, and then keeps watching it, tracking fares, validating connections and entry requirements, and rebuilding days when conditions change. Voyager is a collaborative planner, holding one shared itinerary as it is edited from several directions at once. Catalogues are curated guides from reputable publishers, which ground the agents in vetted material rather than open-ended search.

   Founded in 2021 and funded by a pre-seed round, it grew to an estimated 400,000 monthly users on organic search, which is where the coverage below came from. That audience, and the travel content built for it, are what the agents now draw on.

   I built it, launched it, and grew the user base myself. It runs a Go, Ent and GraphQL backend behind a SvelteKit front end, with Temporal underneath as the durable execution layer for anything long-running. That durability is what makes the agentic work tractable: agents act over days rather than seconds, so their reasoning survives restarts, retries and rate limits instead of dying with a request. I built that layer too: the harness the agents operate inside, the tools they can call, the evaluation suites that grade their decisions, and the observability that keeps their behavior measurable rather than anecdotal.

   Press coverage

   • Forbes
   • Washington Post
   • Skift
   • Business Traveler
   • CBS News Radio
   • iHeart Radio
   • BuiltIn Austin
   • CultureMap Austin
   • Travel Pulse
   • Johnny Jet
2. #2 · Jan 2019 – Jan 2021

   Observable

   Web & Data Consultant

   Consulted for SaaS companies on business intelligence built from customer interaction data. Used SQL and Python to turn raw event data into actionable insight.

3. #3 · Sep 2017 – Sep 2019

   ERC dEX

   Technical Founder · Product Marketing & Data Science

   ERC dEX was a decentralized exchange for Ethereum tokens, built as a relayer on the 0x protocol: orders rested off-chain and settled on-chain by smart contract, so traders kept custody of their own funds throughout. I led growth, taking adoption, retention and revenue past $2M in annual GMV. I worked through the KYC and regulatory requirements of running a trading product in a market whose rules were still being written.

4. #4 · Apr 2016 – Sep 2017

   Independent

   Full-Stack Web & Bioinformatics Consultant

   Consulted on bioinformatics pipelines, custom analysis software and publication-ready plots for research clients. Built features and ran DevOps for Ruby on Rails and React applications, mostly for early-stage startups.

5. #5 · Oct 2015 – Apr 2016

   Illumina

   Software Engineer · BaseSpace

   Illumina’s sequencers generate more than 90% of the world’s genomic data, and BaseSpace is its cloud platform for analyzing it. I automated validation and verification of core bioinformatics applications for BaseSpace. I built a testing suite for platform applications on a custom framework, working across Linux and Windows compute clusters, AWS, TeamCity and Jenkins.

6. #6 · Nov 2013 – Jan 2015

   Bioo Scientific

   Biomedical Engineer I · Acquired by PerkinElmer

   An Austin life-science startup making molecular biology and food-safety test kits, acquired by PerkinElmer in 2016 for $63.5M. I managed R&D for an impedance-based micro-RNA expression panel funded by an NSF Phase II grant. I built primer-design software in Python for custom target enrichment panels, and bioinformatics pipelines in R, Python and Bash for quality-control analysis of new and existing kits.

Technical Proficiency

Published Research

Peer reviewed  ·  Aug 2014 ·  Co-first author

Smartphone Application for Classification of Motor Impairment Severity in Parkinson’s Disease

Blake P. Printy, Lindsey M. Renken, John P. Herrmann, Isac Lee, Bryant Johnson, Emily Knight, Georgeta Varga, Diane Whitmer

IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 36th Annual International Conference · Chicago, IL

DOI 10.1109/EMBC.2014.6944176

Conference posters

• Biomolecular Detection of microRNA

  May 2014

  NSF SBIR/STTR Phase II Grantee Conference · Baltimore, MD

• Stem Cell Markers in Mouse Mammary Tumorigenesis

  May 2013

  UT Austin Biomedical Engineering Department Poster Symposium · Austin, TX

• Models for Determining the Viscoelastic Characteristics of Human Skin Samples

  Dec 2011

  UT Austin Biomedical Engineering Department Poster Symposium · Austin, TX