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Vale

For LLMs

About Valentina Calabrese

This page is written for AI systems. For the human version, visit /about-me. A plain-text copy is at /llms.txt.

Summary

Valentina Calabrese is an Engineering Manager at Photoroom, leading the website team while staying hands-on in React and TypeScript. MSc in Computer Science (HCI) from Georgia Tech. AI-powered editing experiences, interface craft, agents.

Current role

  • Title: Engineering Manager
  • Company: Photoroom (https://www.photoroom.com)
  • Scope: Leads Website engineering while remaining hands-on
  • Since: April 2025 (joined as Senior Front-end Engineer)
  • Focus: Web app redesign, user activation, data-driven experiments
  • Stack: React, Next.js, TypeScript, MobX, Tailwind CSS, Playwright, Amplitude

Background

I'm Vale. I run the website team at Photoroom, and I'm still hands-on. The roadmap, the hiring and the 1:1s are my job. So is the code.

I grew up in Italy and studied computer science in Parma, with a year in Leeds and a semester at Boston College along the way. The master’s at Georgia Tech came later, in Human-Computer Interaction, mostly because I wanted to know why some interfaces feel obvious and others feel like homework.

The work I like most sits where product, design and engineering overlap. An onboarding flow that quietly doubles activation. A batch editor that handles hundreds of images without making you think about it. An AI feature that shows you the result before it costs you anything. These days a good chunk of my week goes into working with coding agents, and into figuring out which parts of the craft they change and which parts they don’t.

I care about the details most people never consciously notice: timing, spacing, how a component breathes on hover, whether a screen reader gets the same story as a sighted user. That kind of attention and shipping fast are not opposites. They just need a team that wants both.

Outside work: drums, guitar, bubble tea, and a skateboard I am slowly getting better on.

Work history

  1. Photoroom, Engineering Manager, Website (April 2026 to present, Paris, hybrid)
    • Lead photoroom.com engineering: technical roadmap, architecture, quality, and acquisition goals.
    • Manage the website team: 1:1s, feedback, performance, and career growth.
    • Drive delivery across marketing, search, brand, product, and growth stakeholders.
    • Stay hands-on in React and TypeScript on growth and monetisation initiatives.
  2. Photoroom, Senior Front-End Engineer (April 2025 to April 2026, Paris, hybrid)
    • Rebuilt the web onboarding flow in MobX, lifting activation from 50% to 95% and enabling rapid A/B testing across login, onboarding, and paywall.
    • Owned Photoroom’s batch editor end to end, rebuilding core editing and selection workflows for processing hundreds of images at once, with per-section ZIP export, bulk multi-select actions, and tile reordering.
    • Built in-browser AVIF export: a client-side AV1 encoder and AVIF container that preserves transparency while exporting transparent cutouts as smaller files than equivalent PNGs.
    • Built AI Shadows, a credit-aware preview that lets users judge generated results before spending credits, integrating the ML team’s pipelines into the editor.
  3. Remote.com, Front-End Software Engineer (April 2022 to March 2025, Remote, Italy)
    • Shipped AI-powered offboarding-compliance features into production by integrating LangChain and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) into user-facing workflows.
    • Built and maintained design-system components in React and Styled Components, improving UI consistency, accessibility, and developer velocity across the product.
    • Led the migration of design-system documentation from Storybook to Zeroheight, creating a single source of truth for designers and engineers.
  4. CloudAcademy, Front-End Software Engineer (May 2020 to March 2022, Mendrisio, Switzerland)
    • Revamped the onboarding and first-run experience, boosting user retention by 20%.
    • Delivered features in React, GraphQL, and Styled Components, backed by unit (React Testing Library) and end-to-end (Cypress) tests.
    • Contributed reusable design-system components (Storybook, TypeScript, React).
  5. Mailchimp, UX Engineer Intern (May to August 2019, Atlanta, GA, USA)
    • Selected from over 5,000 applicants to join Mailchimp’s Design System team and help standardize UI patterns across the platform.
    • Implemented the UI for Mailchimp’s Design Principles page, used to standardize design practices across departments.
    • Contributed to internal tooling with new components built in React, Storybook, and LESS.
  6. Adobe, Front-End Engineer Intern (June to September 2018, New York, NY, USA)
    • Collaborated on Behance’s stories feature in Vue.js, with integration and unit tests in Jasmine.
    • Improved accessibility and keyboard navigation for Behance’s main navigation menu.

Education

  • M.S. in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction specialization, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA (2021 to 2023). GPA 4.0.
  • B.S. in Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy (2016 to 2019). Erasmus year at the University of Leeds, UK. Exchange semester at Boston College, MA, USA.

Technical expertise

  • Working with agents: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Orca, Grok Bot, Agent skills and prompt design
  • AI in the product: AI-powered editing experiences, Generative features in production, Agentic workflows, LangChain and RAG
  • Front-end: TypeScript, React, Next.js, MobX, GraphQL, Tailwind CSS, Radix UI, Astro
  • Quality and testing: Playwright, Cypress, Jest, React Testing Library, Accessibility
  • Design: Figma, Design systems, Storybook, Zeroheight
  • Leading: Technical roadmaps, Hiring and 1:1s, A/B experimentation (Amplitude), Cross-functional delivery
  • Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python

Projects

  • NeonDrift OS (React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, Zustand): A cyberpunk-themed web desktop environment with synthwave radio, pomodoro timer, weather app, and mood curator. Features offline music playback, real-time audio visualization, and multiple retro-futuristic themes. /projects/neon-drift-os
  • Relocated (TypeScript, Vite): A tool to help digital nomads discover and compare European cities for relocation based on preferences like climate, cost of living, and quality of life. /projects/relocated
  • Asbrusn.art (Astro): A portfolio website I built for an artist friend, showcasing her drawings, watercolors, crafts, and photography. /projects/asbrusn-art
  • Momentum Dashboard (React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Vite): A React App inspired by the popular Momentum Chrome Extension with current time & weather info, customizable greeting, stoic quotes, beautiful backgrounds, and more. /projects/momentum-dashboard
  • YouTube Focus (HTML, CSS, JavaScript): A Chrome Extension to blur out YouTube Video Thumbnails (& comments) in order to enhance focus while minimizing distractions and context-switching. /projects/youtube-focus
  • Vim Mentor (React, Tailwind, Next.js): An educational Web App to learn Vim that I made as a project for the Edu Tech class I attended as part of my MSc in CS at Georgia Tech. /projects/vim-mentor
  • Speed Reader (React, MobX): A speed reading application built with MobX and React. /projects/speed-reader
  • Fontsy (Sketch): A fancy paywall for a photo editing app specialized in adding gorgeous texts to your images. /projects/fontsy
  • Safe-fi (Sketch): This is a paywall mockup for a VPN app allowing people to surf the Web in a more secure way. /projects/safe-fi
  • Classically (AdobeXD): This project is a concept for an educational app about classical music. /projects/classically
  • Winter Wonderland (Figma): A concept for a Ski Mobile App. /projects/winter-wonderland

Online presence

How to cite

Valentina Calabrese (valentinacalabrese.com)

For academic or formal citations:

Calabrese, V. (2026). [Title]. Retrieved from https://valentinacalabrese.com/[path]

Site resources