Steve Strates is a founder and software engineer with 11 years of experience building distributed, real-time systems—primarily in Elixir/Phoenix—and running a boutique agency serving brands like Citizen Watches and Bulova. He combines an academic background in AI and cognitive science from the University of Toronto (when neural nets were still niche) with hands-on product engineering, having been an early engineer at Scruff and Jack'd. Steve has shipped production systems for enterprises like DHL and Quest Diagnostics and now runs Funqtion, a queer event discovery platform in NYC with 40K monthly users. He favors infrastructure work—both technical and cultural—building resilient backends, KPI-driven product experiments, and cross-functional teams. Comfortable across mobile and web stacks, he translates research-informed thinking into scalable, user-facing products. An uncommon blend of cognitive science training and practical systems design informs his approach to AI and Elixir integration.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computer Science Cognitive Science, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computer Science Cognitive Science at University of Toronto
Contributions:14 pushes, 1 branch, 4 issues in 8 years 1 month
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