Joel Drotleff
Founding Engineer at Stealth AI Startup
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJoel Drotleff is a pragmatic iOS and macOS engineer with 11+ years of experience building zero-to-one consumer and B2B apps, notably leading innovation at Marco Polo (10M+ downloads, 4.8 stars). He specializes in shipping experimental products under fuzzy requirements—prototyping quickly with UIKit/SwiftUI, AVFoundation, Supabase/Firebase and AI services to turn ideas into real customer traction. Joel focuses on simplicity: ruthless removal of dead code, minimal but effective tests, small focused teams, and using the highest-level frameworks that deliver value. Recently he’s driven AI-first development workflows—building custom subagents, fast build verifiers, and production-ready prompt engineering to reliably generate idiomatic code with Claude and GPT. Examples include Channels (creator communities), Tofu (Marco Polo for Work) and SkyJam (AI-facilitated social app), all shipped with tiny teams and frequent user interviews. Based in the SF Bay Area with a UCSD HCI background, he pairs product intuition with disciplined engineering to make hard problems practical.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
University of California San Diego
Stackoverflow
1,621reputation
90kreached
39answers
15questions
nsdate
top-5%
Github Skills (140)
benchmark10
postgresql10
realtime10
backend10
firebase10
auth10
compilation-time10
ai10
swift10
database10
git-workflow10
xcode10
supabase10
deno9
chatgpt-api9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
joeldrotleff/kickstart.nvim
May 2024 - Sep 2025
A launch point for your personal nvim configuration
Contributions:254 pushes, 3 branches in 1 year 3 months
joeldrotleff/XcodeBenchmark
Mar 2022 - Apr 2026
XcodeBenchmark measures the compilation time of a large codebase on iMac, MacBook, and Mac Pro
Contributions:6 pushes in 4 years 2 months
compilationimacmacbookmacswift
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