Alya Abbott
COO at Kandra Labs, Inc. (creators of Zulip)
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlya Abbott is a seasoned operator and technical leader with nine years of experience building product-driven teams and data science capabilities across startups and large platforms. As COO of Kandra Labs (creators of the well-known open-source Zulip chat) she blends product leadership with hands-on full-stack contributions to the Zulip codebase, from UI tweaks to API work and documentation. Previously she led telematics and multiple ML teams at Lyft and owned matching and search algorithms at Upwork, translating research-grade models into production signals that improve user outcomes. Trained as a linguist and mathematician at MIT (PhD in Linguistics), she brings a rare mix of formal research rigor, applied machine learning, and operational execution. Colleagues know her for moving smoothly between strategy and code—designing roadmaps one week and shipping front-end features the next.
9 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Linguistics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Russian, German, French
Github Skills (15)
chat10
javascript10
web-development10
web-application10
webapp10
collaboration9
react9
documentation9
python9
html9
user-interface9
rest-api8
css8
api-design8
channel7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
zulip/zulip
Dec 2016 - Jan 2023
Zulip server and web application. Open-source team chat that helps teams stay productive and focused.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:793 reviews, 207 commits, 777 PRs in 6 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Alya primarily contributed to the Zulip web application, making changes to both the front-end and back-end aspects of the platform. The user's work involved creating and updating user documentation, modifying UI components, and adding new features. They also made changes to settings pages, implemented modifications to API code, and worked on a variety of front-end templates.
pythonweb-applicationcollaborationzulipjavascript
alya/zulip
Dec 2016 - Apr 2025
Zulip server - powerful open source group chat
Contributions:459 pushes, 429 branches in 8 years 4 months
zulipgroup-chatchatcommunicationaio
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