Enrique Espaillat

When YouTube arrived, I started teaching myself to program from videos. Where I grew up, almost nobody knew what computer science was.

Then I found Harvard’s CS50 and watched the lectures late at night, a long way from Cambridge.

CS50 · Lecture 0

In high school I founded our school’s first international robotics team, Team Drift, and was its captain. The robot did not always go where the code said.

I went on to study computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This time, in a classroom.

Goldman Sachs was my first job as a software engineer. I worked on the pipes that fed current public market data and charts into our research, and delivered the finished documents. Researchers could write whole reports in one consistent way, with the latest numbers in them.

At Oscar Health I worked on front end and mobile for our members. I helped build Doctor on Call, then we launched Virtual Primary Care: a whole primary care practice with video visits, text messages and appointment booking, so members could get care easily.

At Stripe I worked on funding for Issuing, which lets businesses create their own cards. I helped launch Charge Cards, Charge Cards in EMEA and Net Settlement: different ways for businesses to fund their card programs without tying up more cash than they need.

I built the product APIs and the systems behind them, and that software moved the money. It settled with the card networks, collected from clients and reconciled every cent automatically, staying compliant and moving as fast as the payment rails allowed.

Gyde helps insurance brokers look after their clients. Our AI agent, Gia, talks with them by voice and text, and compares their plans at renewal time.

I was the first engineer, and I like to go deep at every layer. Early on I did our HIPAA-compliant infrastructure work, until we hired a head of infrastructure. With the team, I built the telephony and WebRTC stack behind Gia’s voice, stood up her SMS agent, and worked on the orchestration that decides when she reaches out and follows up. On the front end, I care how our components feel to use, and I like chasing down why a screen re-renders when it shouldn’t.

Right now I’m going deep on coding agents, and on how far they can stretch what one engineer can do. I call that setup my forge.