carpedm — dating platform (acquired)
Engineering leadership through a dating platform's pre-exit phase, ending in successful acquisition.
the brief
CarpeDM needed senior engineering leadership during the most consequential phase of any startup's life — the run-up to an acquisition. The product had to keep shipping, the team had to stay coordinated, due diligence had to find a clean codebase, and the matchmaking and chat systems had to scale through marketing pushes without embarrassing outages.
the work
Engineering leadership through pre-exit. Owned technical direction and execution while preparing the codebase, infrastructure, and processes for due diligence.
Core dating application. Architected the matchmaking engine, real-time chat over Socket.IO, photo/video media handling, and the swipe/match UX.
Real-time messaging at scale. Bidirectional chat with delivery receipts, read state, typing indicators, and message persistence — built to survive both reconnection storms and traffic spikes.
Sprint cadence & dev standards. Introduced predictable sprint structure and code review practices that improved delivery predictability week-over-week.
Due-diligence-ready repo. Documentation, CI, code coverage, and architecture clarity that held up under acquirer review.
the result
CarpeDM was successfully acquired. The engineering work led during the pre-exit phase contributed directly to the codebase health that survived diligence.
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