Austin Born
Lead AI Engineer at Actual AI
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAustin Born is a technical founder and former senior blockchain engineer with nine years of experience building foundational protocols and infrastructure for decentralized systems. He led Data Feeds smart contract architecture at Chainlink Labs, helping secure over $50B in monthly volume across web3 protocols, and contributed to both on-chain contracts and off-chain external adapters used widely by the oracle ecosystem. As founder of Shinzo Labs, he focuses on improving UX to accelerate decentralized technology adoption, blending deep protocol knowledge with product-first thinking. His background includes full-stack engineering for high-volume crypto platforms (Omniex, acquired by Gemini) and hands-on Solidity, TypeScript, and Python work implementing and testing integrations like CoinAPI. Austin’s early career in engineering education and research, plus an exchange at Nagoya University, hints at a strong foundation in systems thinking and cross-cultural collaboration. He pairs practical production experience with open-source contributions to mission-critical tooling in the oracle and blockchain space.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Computer Engineering Computer Hardware Engineering, B.S. Computer Engineering Computer Hardware Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignNon-degree (exchange program) Computer Engineering, Non-degree (exchange program) Computer Engineering at Nagoya University
Spanish, Japanese
Github Skills (20)
javascript10
solidity10
extern10
adaptor10
externals10
ethereum10
blockchain10
adapter10
nock10
chainlink10
api-testing10
integration-testing10
typescript9
typescript-types9
go9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
smartcontractkit/external-adapters-js
Oct 2021 - Jan 2023
Monorepo containing JavaScript implementation of external adapters
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:4 releases, 926 reviews, 127 commits in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Austin primarily focused on implementing and testing API integrations for external adapters. They wrote integration tests for a CoinAPI API, creating test fixtures and snapshot tests to ensure the adapter functioned correctly. The user also fixed existing integration tests for the CoinAPI adapter and updated code to pass tests. Their work involved interacting with and validating the functionality of external APIs.
javascriptmonorepo
smartcontractkit/chainlink
Mar 2023 - Sep 2024
node of the decentralized oracle network, bridging on and off-chain computation
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:118 reviews, 35 PRs, 255 pushes in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Austin primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of smart contract code, specifically focusing on the "mercury_verifier" contracts. Their work involved adding indexes, updating contract versions, removing checks, and modifying events. They also made changes related to the handling of config prefixes. The commits involved the use of Solidity and related tooling for contract generation and testing.
golangcomputationethereumblockchaindecentralized
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