Mingjie Jiang
About
I’m a product engineer who enjoys building tools and platforms that make a difference. I’m especially drawn to projects in education as it holds personal significance to me.
Currently building Recess, where kids make friends, get inspired, and design their own education.
Contact
Education
Departed after 1.5 years without degree when I realized I learn better and faster outside the structure.
While there, I led Cal Hacks (the school's flagship hackathon). I also organized Build the Future, a speaker series course about startups at the business school.
Work Experience
Making magic happen by giving kids the agency they need to become exceptional at anything in the safest environment on the internet.
Laid out the foundations of Commsor's new platform Matcha, a connections-building social platform for professionals (formerly Meetsy).
Advised the team primarily on their adoption and conversion to Next.js App Router, including modernizing the entire frontend stack, implementing a design system, and creating high-quality reusable components.
I build the core web platform for Ender, a competition-based platform where kids get rewarded to explore their creativity and build real portfolios of projects and skills.
I built the platform with a TypeScript/Next.js/GraphQL stack, created reusable design system components with Tailwind and Radix UI, and designed delightful user experiences with Framer Motion. Also help established a quality-driven engineering culture at Ender, striving for perfect execution at every detail.
I led CodeDay's Labs & Init programs, both helping CS students at underrepresented & underfunded colleges make their first contributions in the open-source community. Students collaborated with professionals from the tech industry and worked together to contribute to a variety of open source projects.
Volunteering
Execute Big is a nonprofit organization that operates creative, impactful, and transparent technology exploration programs. We funded students to travel from underrepresented areas of the country to cities with opportunities, hosted educational events around the country to drive excitement from low-income communities, and operated one of the largest online summer education programs, Tech Roulette.
I created and maintained technical solutions to power the growing global network of female/non-binary students interested in STEM. I set up systems for their seasonal competitions, maintained their student forum, and built Infinity, an open-source, high-performance and deployment-ready puzzle hunt platform for their puzzle hunts & math competitions.
I grew Hack Club's student community, led planning for The Flagship Summit (a 3-day leadership conference in SF for 75 student leaders of CS education programs around the world), and developed curriculum and guides now used by tens of thousands of students around the world.
During my time there, I also ran countless hackathon-style events, hosting the largest non-collegiate hackathons in Chicago, DC, and bringing the first to Richmond, Baltimore, and Atlanta.
Side Projects
With funding from Amjad Masad (founder of Replit), I co-created and built an online summer program to help more students around the world explore diverse fields in computer science. More than 1,500 students participated, and among them 800+ are under 21. They come from 60+ countries around the world and covered 40+ states in the U.S.