Reuben Son

Employment History

Led a team of 7 engineers responsible for growing Vox’s affiliate marketing business ($40M revenue per year) for multiple product recommendation sites, including The Strategist and Pop Sugar.
Mentored senior and mid-level engineers towards leading key initiatives, such as the migration of a critical codebase to Nest.js and TypeScript, achieving 100% test coverage, and significantly improving service performance, reliability, and maintainability.
Spearheaded cross-team collaboration as the primary contact for the CMS powering the New York Magazine network, providing developer guidance and technical leadership in the absence of a dedicated CMS team.
Collaborated with product management to align stakeholder priorities with team initiatives, resulting in optimized workflows, improved team morale, and consistent delivery on critical project timelines.

Led architecture and development of a centralized product information system (Express API, Postgres, Redis, Vue.js), driving a 50%+ increase in affiliate revenue and streamlining editorial and business development workflows.
Launched The Strategist’s award-winning redesign and its UK-internationalized version, driving 400% YoY growth in affiliate revenue and establishing the site as a best-in-class product recommendation source.
Developed a cron microservice integrating Amazon’s Product API, normalizing data and automating price updates for tens of thousands of products daily, enhancing user experience and improving monetization.

Developed UI for launch of New York Magazine’s digital subscriptions checkout flow.
Reduced photo editor effort by 30%+ with a microservice to improve consistency in product images.
Overhauled the production of advertising units in Google Ad Manager to allow the ad-sales team to work with minimal input from product/dev.
Improved user-engagement reporting through a reimplementation of Google Analytics and GTM across the network of sites, reaching 40M unique visitors per month.

Conducted computational bio-physics research with MATLAB codebase, co-authoring many peer-reviewed publications in journals such as IEEE.

Graduated with honors and published research findings in Physical Review E (link)

Forthcoming essay for Are.na Annual 2025 - link
MIDI Archive — Built generative AI model (PyTorch) and an archive for music on the early web (Elventy), during a programming retreat at Recurse Center — link
Frog Chorus — Developed multi-agent app (Svelte) with cross-device acoustic interaction — link
Weaving Music — Algorithmic music generator based on weaving, built with Nuxt + Vue.js — link