Summary
Lucas Smolic is a hybrid engineering leader and operator with 14 years of experience building scalable web platforms and hands-on R&D in food science, currently serving as VP of Operations and R&D at Origami Sake Company. He blends backend expertise in Python and Ruby with frontend JavaScript knowledge, repeatedly stepping into individual-contributor roles within fast-moving startups to ship critical systems and automation. Lucas has led engineering organizations through architecture, hiring, and cloud scaling while also designing production workflow improvements, SOPs, and lab data tooling for sake breweries—an unusual combination of software craft and fermentation science. He founded the Sake Brewers Guild to demystify sake chemistry and runs practical R+D projects and a yeast bank that improve product consistency under constrained conditions. Known for being language-agnostic and pragmatic, he pairs cost-conscious operational strategy with a taste for technical detail, from ETL pipelines to embedded brewery sensors and reporting scripts. Based in Kingston, MA, he returned from a pandemic sabbatical eager to apply lessons learned to data, backend, or frontend roles that value cross-disciplinary problem solving.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Japanese Language and Literature, Japanese Language and Literature at Japan Foundation Los Angeles
Food Science and Technology, Food Science and Technology at Sake Professional Course
Silver Lake Regional High School
Emerson College
Japanese