Hello! I’m Julia, a software engineer and founder based in the United States.

Present
I’m currently building software for the energy transition. Here are some of my experiments.

Past

  • Brex: I was one of the youngest engineering managers at the hyper-growth startup, having started as a software engineer in 2019. I was responsible for the Card Fraud, Card Growth, and Rewards teams and got to support some of the most brilliant and experienced engineers I’ve met. As an individual contributor, I worked on features for expense management such as receipts matching, ERP integrations, and helped build our first-ever partner API. I wrote about my learnings and also shared some experiences with Built In NYC.
  • Apple: Backend engineer on Siri Search, directly responsible for the TV & Flights domains as well as a new unreleased Safari feature. Built knowledge graph pipelines for ML researchers. Ran some live demo’s at Cupertino HQ to an org of 200+ people, and to the EVP of AI/ML. I was also an intern mentor.
  • Microsoft: Two-time software engineering intern building cloud infrastructure & developer tools. Got to meet Satya Nadella and his executive team, and won a prize at a company-wide hackathon.
  • Brown Computer Science & Economics: Brown CS gave me an incredible environment to learn to code and become a teaching assistant. I was also in leadership roles for Brown Women in Computer Science, Lean In, Women in Business, and the Brown Investment Group
  • Web3 Projects: Since becoming intrigued by Ethereum in 2017, I taught myself the Ethereum development stack and built independent projects in my spare time. Some of my favorites include: A no-code token minter on Polygon, bridge search tool, payments with stablecoins, and a clean energy NFT marketplace.

Origins
Born in Rio de Janeiro to Chinese parents starting a small business, I was sent to China a couple of months after I was born to be raised by my grandparents. I grew up speaking Chinese and Portuguese. I was the first in my family to attend university.

I have a strong curiosity for the intersection of computer science, global issues, and the humanities. I love to read, engage with builders (especially from underrepresented groups), and am a loyal member of Barry’s Bootcamp.

Say hello at julia@juliawu.me! Thank you for stopping by.

Select Projects

  • SolarGPT: A Q&A chatbot for clean energy policy and incentives, powered by OpenAI’s language models. It uses hundreds of documents stored as vector embeddings to retrieve answers. Since launching in August ‘23, there have been nearly 500 unique visits (as of December ‘23). Built with Django, React, Langchain, Pinecone.
  • Brex Insights Dashboard: Self-driven project while interviewing at Brex. I consumed every piece of content I could find about Brex, dug into the company’s customer support pages and “reverse-engineered” the Brex Dashboard while incorporating some ideas for new features.

  • Lua Token Minter: #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt. A no-code token minter on Polygon (scalability solution for Ethereum). Create a token in under 1 minute and pay <$0.1 in gas fees. Zero coding required. I started a habit of launching something on my birthday every year since 2019, and this was the one for 2021!

  • Superset (Product Hunt | Demo): Product Search for peer-to-peer marketplaces. Winner on Pioneer. Presented in online demo day to audience of 400, including Laura Deming (Longevity Fund), Tyler Cowen (economist), Zach Sims (Codecademy) and Patrick McKenzie (Stripe).

  • CryptoRenewables (Write-up): Inspired by CryptoKitties, made an NFT game representing elements of clean energy in 2018. Winner during the first Pioneer tournament.

  • Bridgedex (Demo): A “Pokédex” (catalog) for cross-chain bridges, providing transparent and real-time information for bridge users. Personally interivewed ~20 users and built POC during the Jump/Terra hacker house in April-May 2022 (Chicago). Sponsored by Jump Crypto, Hashed, Delphi, Galaxy Digital, Terraform Labs. Won 3rd place ($10k prize). Featured on Li.Fi’s Multichain Newsletter. Subsequently explored bridging SDKs for games by integrating Axelar and Circle’s USDC bridge.

  • Tiden: Checkouts with crypto. Winner at HackMoney 2021.

  • Fiat-to-crypto Invoicing: For global freelancers/solopreneurs that prefer to get paid in crypto. Your client can still use a credit card, and we send you the token you want.

  • Optimistic Payments (Demo | GitHub): A shop that allows users to immediately obtain the token that the merchant prefers to receive in, even if they don’t have it just yet. By embedding the Uniswap Widget, the user can swap their existing tokens into the types supported by the merchant, which allows merchants to accept a wider range of customers. Winner of the Uniswap Grants bounty at ETHGlobal2022.

  • Trophy Case (Demo | GitHub | Showcase): Created at NFT Hack 2022: A dead simple way for developers to let users mint NFTs from in-app achievements, and a wallet for users to view all their achievements & discover others with similar interests. Winner of “Best Use of Polygon” and IPFS prizes. Built with Grace Wang and Melanie Tam.

  • Medici: A wallet for USD stablecoins that earns interest. Began during HackMoney, a month-long hackathon for decentralized finance. Highlighted by the Compound Protocol as one of their favorite projects at the hackathon. It became a top 20 project on Pioneer (out of ~1k). Participated in IDEO’s Product Validation Day. Prototyped in Brazilian Portuguese & English. Stack: Node/Express, Web3.js, Infura, Compound smart contracts & API, non-custodial wallets such as Portis/Fortmatic/Torus.

  • DeFi Terminal: Bloomberg Terminal for DeFi: Real-time data, metrics, and news for decentralized finance. Aggregating data from The Graph, DeFi Pulse, and others.

  • Voltaire (Demo | Description): A wallet earning yield from money markets on Polygon (Ethereum scalability solution). Integrated with Aave, Zapper’s data API, and the Torus wallet for seamless/passwordless login using social accounts.
    Built during the Scaling Ethereum hackathon. Winner of the Torus sponsor prize.

  • Poolside (Description):
    Poolside is the source for new listings and trending assets in decentralized finance. Find and search through real-time data aggregated from The Graph, Uniswap, 1inch, Aavegotchi, Coinmarketcap and more. Built during the MarketMake hackathon. Winner of prizes from The Graph and Aavegotchi.

  • Temaki (Demo): I got curious about the Zapper (DeFi) API and wanted to experiment with reading wallet and other on-chain data and try “zapping” into liquidity pools. Prototyped a simple web app that reads wallet holdings on Ethereum, Polygon, and Binance Smart Chain. Also implemented UX for opening Sushiswap positions on Polygon.

  • SnapMed: Real-time, remote “office hours” with verified medical experts. During COVID-19, we hear a lot of advice/news, but don’t always know what’s accurate. So SnapMed is here to democratize instant access to reliable information. Built with 3 teammates during a COVID-19 hackathon.

  • Red Crypto Envelope: Conditional spending on Ethereum.

  • Ethereum Goals Tracker: A full-stack dApp for accountability, made in 2017 after teaching my self some Solidity. View on Github

  • Personal Assistant Chatbot (Portuguese): A telegram bot in Portuguese for the Brazilian audience, initially as a thought partner but with the potential to become more like a personal assistant/secretary. An experiment with prompt engineering and playing around with Chatfuel, which offers off-the-shelf GPT integrations with existing messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp.

  • HelloBlockchain: While learning about crypto in 2017, I noticed there weren’t as many resources for the Brazilian audience. So I created one and translated resources from English to Portuguese 🇧🇷

Writing

Awards / Honors

  • 2x Winner on Pioneer (Remote accelerator founded by former YC partner Daniel Gross, funded by Stripe and a16z)
  • Winner at HackMoney 2021, the world’s biggest DeFi hackathon to date. Among 16 finalist projects selected from 231 submissions (1100+ hackers)
  • Judge at HackMoney 2022, the largest event by ETHGlobal, a leading Ethereum community/hackathon.
  • Third place at Jump/Terra Hackathon, 2022
  • Prizewinner at NFT Hack (Polygon, IPFS), 2022
  • Prizewinner at Scaling Ethereum Hackathon, 2021
  • Prizewinner at MarketMake (DeFi) Hackathon, 2021
  • Kernel Batch 4 Fellow. Among ~20 finalist projects from the batch (from 200 submissions) selected to present to advisors, investors, and ecosystem partners
  • ZFellow
  • On Deck Fellow
  • Pear Builders Fellow
  • Speaker at Brex’s first tech talk for candidates in Brazil (2021)
  • Speaker at YC Women Engineers in Startups Series (2021)
  • Speaker at Brex + 500 Startups fireside chat
  • Former Brown University Women in Business President, member of Alumni Advisory Board
  • Founder of Lean In at Brown (started as freshman), invited to leadership summit w/ Sheryl Sandberg
  • Winner, HackForHer Prize at Microsoft Company-wide Hackathon 2015
  • Winner, Usability Prize at Hack@Brown 2014
  • Finalist at HackBrazil 2017
  • Finalist at Carnegie Mellon University Venture Challenge 2016
  • Square Code Camp for Women Engineers (20 selected among 500 applicants)
  • Google Grace Hopper Scholarship
  • Facebook Grace Hopper Scholarship
  • Google Anita Borg Academic Scholarship
  • Microsoft Academic Scholarship
  • Brown University International Scholarship Committee Grant
  • Internship offers from J.P. Morgan (Sales & Trading) with scholarship, Mastercard (software engineering)
  • Graded American School of Sao Paulo (High School in Brazil) Alumni Spotlight

Extras

Piano