Caitlin Ma

Professional Experience

Software Engineer - The Knot Worldwide, New York, NY

October 2025 - Present

Designed and built full-stack services using Typescript, NestJS, Prisma, PostgreSQL, React/Next.js, Docker, AWS, and Terraform for The Knot Worldwide’s vendor marketplace, helping modernize functionality within a legacy application ecosystem that supports nearly 950,000 businesses globally.
Serve as a go-to engineer for NestJS and Prisma, helping define backend implementation patterns and resolve complex technical issues across the team.
Delivered a high-priority spam mitigation solution by rapidly standing up a new NestJS application foundation and core service architecture, leveraging my deep NestJS expertise to take the service from concept to production-ready launch within one week.
Led CI/CD migration automation with GitHub Actions and AWS for a vendor scheduling and availability platform, serving as the team’s go-to engineer for migrations and deployment workflows. Developed backend logic for syncing calendar and event data leveraging Databus and Cronofy, writing SQL queries to validate data integrity during a legacy-to-new database migration, catching discrepancies and ensuring accurate provisioning across systems.
Identified and solved critical infrastructure and environment bugs that threatened delivery across multiple services, developing a workable path forward that unblocked active development. Persistently drove the solution through cross-team dependencies and organizational friction, and the approach was adopted across the vendor zone as the interim standard while a permanent fix was being built.
Partner closely with stakeholders and adjacent engineering teams to turn ambiguous business requirements into enterprise-grade systems that improve reliability, streamline delivery, and support broader business outcomes.

Software Engineer - Patra, El Dorado Hills, CA

March 2022 - August 2025

Founding engineer on Patra’s first B2B SaaS product, building a Next.js/React frontend and NestJS backend for an AI-powered policy comparison platform in the insurance and financial services space.
Owned key frontend initiatives that improved self-service onboarding and expanded the platform’s ability to support complex insurance workflows, including building a multi-step Next.js onboarding flow for agency creation, user assignment, impersonation, and role-based access control. This feature reduced onboarding time by 40%, increased sales velocity by 25%, and supported 10+ new clients in the first quarter.
Developed reusable nested-field UI components for complex hierarchical policy data input, including field-level validation, dynamic form states, full CRUD functionality, and side-by-side policy comparison workflows for AI-extracted insurance data, delivering a strategic product expansion in close partnership with stakeholders.
Redesigned the platform’s data model and API structure to support complex parent-child relationships, enabling the application to capture and render and persist previously unsupported data models. This feature enabled more advanced client workflows, contributing to a 25% increase in enterprise client adoption and a projected $1M in pipeline value
Championed maintainable engineering practices through reusable component design, test driven development, scalable frontend patterns, clean architecture, and strong collaboration across product and engineering teams.
Regularly presented feature work in demos, technical walkthroughs, and stakeholder sessions, clearly communicating UI decisions, technical tradeoffs, and implementation details.