Coming, Sprinting, Leaving, Learning
Last Friday (September 12th, 2025) was my last day at Jellyfish after 5+ wonderful years. For those wondering what's next, the tl;dr is that I took an offer at Handshake AI, where I’ll help connect vetted domain experts to frontier AI labs so human judgment can evaluate, challenge, and teach the models we rely on.
I’m writing this from a coffee shop in Reykjavik, taking a quiet week between roles to reflect on the last few years. This is a trip I've envisioned for myself since I was a teenager; relaxing in geothermal hot springs, hiking through lava fields, and basking in the culture here are all on the agenda. Everyone always recommends taking time off between roles, and though I only have a few days, I'm going to make the most of it.
This is not a blog post about "the parts of myself I kept and lost when I switched jobs" or "top 5 reasons you should quit your job NOW!" Growing up at Jellyfish has been really special, and I want to share some of the experiences that came before, during, and after my time here. There are some fun stories and valuable lessons here that I'd like to share; for the folks I worked with, for anyone navigating a pivot, and for my future self looking back on what I chose and why.
Coming
When it comes to job searching, warm intros have beaten cold submits for me, every time.
My first internship in tech was at a Cambridge-based startup called Sense, where my uncle was the director of manufacturing. He introduced me to the data science team after hearing that I was teaching myself machine learning (remember that phrase?) in high school. Sense's product analyzed home electrical consumption signals and predicted what appliances were running, giving you actionable ways to reduce your energy usage. I mainly wrote blog posts/created data visualizations and analyzed trends in U.S. home energy consumption data, but it was a great place to enforce my skills as a Python programmer and as a data scientist.
My introduction to Jellyfish was unique to say the least. I met one of the founding engineers, Glenn Barnett, at a local science fair while I was demonstrating the Needham High School Robotics Club to elementary school students. I struck up a conversation with him and within minutes we clicked. He told me that he "just made a career switch to a brand new startup" and to let me know if I was looking for work in the future. A few years later, during my first semester at UIUC, I thought back to that conversation, and reached out to him via LinkedIn asking about open internship opportunities. I was invited to interview at Jellyfish's old office by the Boston Commons over Thanksgiving break, and given an offer to join the team as one of their first young talents.
I feel extremely lucky to have met Glenn the day I did, and to have the vim to reach out and see what Jellyfish was up to. Not everything in life is a networking opportunity, but I find that it helps to be always networking. Friends you make today may go off to start their own company and ask you to join them. Maybe that guy you met on a bus going the wrong way to a club meeting in college will end up being one of your closest friends, introduce you to your future partner, who convinces you to move to New York City, and opens the door that leads to a new chapter of your career (true story!)
Sprinting
Once I began my work at Jellyfish, I felt like I had a lot to prove. I was 19 years old when I first onboarded, surrounded by people who had been in the industry for many years (even decades). Jellyfish's product is an engineering management platform, which is a fancy way of saying that our software can answer questions like "are we working on more bugs than we usually do?" or "what projects are projected to finish later than we thought?" So, my first software engineering role was to build the software that my own manager used to track my performance and the nature of my work. Cool. Totally not stressful at all to an intern.
My greater purpose at Jellyfish, after wearing as many hats as possible, was to be someone who could understand a need of the business and utilize our existing infrastructure to implement it. I worked on a bunch of different teams and task forces, and learned a lot about the tradeoffs of writing high quality code vs. moving as fast as the team needed to. This is product engineering at its core; it requires a lot of context, cross-domain technical expertise, and gumption. When done well, you merge wielding an enormous responsibility with fierce ownership, and there's nothing quite like it.
One of the most valuable things about Jellyfish was simply learning how other companies do engineering management differently. Our data is rich with information; I could switch between customer instances and see how they set up their team hierarchies, how they track deliverables, and what really mattered to them. This has given me so much empathy as an engineer, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to absorb as much of this information as possible to synthesize it for my own team's rituals. I feel like I can now leverage this experience to be a better teammate, a better leader, and a better software engineer.
Leaving
The opportunity at Handshake came through a close friend who’d joined the team not long ago. What started as a curious intro became a whirlwind: a few conversations, a fast loop, and within a week I was on the phone with a recruiter hearing a verbal offer. The speed forced clarity. I wrote down what actually matters to me right now: mission, people, scope, learning curve, and what I felt in my gut. In the end, the chance to make AI smarter and safer for everyone with someone I trust felt like the right next bet.
Signing the Handshake offer couldn't be farther from an indictment of Jellyfish. If anything, it was harder because of how energized I’ve been by what we’ve been shipping lately. That made this decision feel bittersweet in the best way. It was a pull rather than a push.
This was also the first time I’ve ever given a formal two weeks’ notice. I learned to give public and private goodbyes, transferred google calendar events to their new rightful owners, and had a happy hour with friends and coworkers at a rooftop bar in Chelsea as a proper send-off. The warm wishes and love that I received from everyone that day proved once and for all, over the last few years, I had clearly done something right!
On my last day, I took one more slow walk past the boards and dashboards I’d lived in for years and felt that mix of pride and nervousness you only get when you’re at a real inflection point. I’m excited for what we’ve been building at Jellyfish to keep compounding without me, and I’m equally excited to start something where the problems are new, the stakes feel big, and the learning curve is steep again.
And, according to Jellyfish, my 5+ years can be summarized in a few numbers:
- 65k lines of code added
- 30k lines of code removed
- 3.7k commits
- 2.3k files changed
- 742 pull requests merged
- 1350 jira issues worked on
Learning
If I boil five years down to a few lessons, it’s this:
- careers compound through people more than projects
- context is a gift, so write things down (for yourself and others) when you get the chance
- speed wins the day but quality wins the year(s)
- and the right next step usually looks like a steep learning curve with people you trust.
Hats off to the entire Jellyfish team for building something truly amazing, and I can't wait to start at Handshake next week. For now, I'll finish my latte and check into my hostel soon. I have the rest of my life to reminisce on the good ol' days, and a limited time in Iceland to enjoy my temporary freedom.
