Valentina Calabrese

Experience

1. April 2026 to present

   Paris, hybrid

   Photoroom · Engineering Manager, Website

   • 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. April 2025 to April 2026

   Paris, hybrid

   Photoroom · Senior Front-End Engineer

   • 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. April 2022 to March 2025

   Remote, Italy

   Remote.com · Front-End Software Engineer

   • 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. May 2020 to March 2022

   Mendrisio, Switzerland

   CloudAcademy · Front-End Software Engineer

   • 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. May to August 2019

   Atlanta, GA, USA

   Mailchimp · UX Engineer Intern

   • 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. June to September 2018

   New York, NY, USA

   Adobe · Front-End Engineer Intern

   • 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

• 2021 to 2023

  M.S. in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction specialization

  Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. GPA 4.0.

• 2016 to 2019

  B.S. in Computer Science

  Università degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy. Erasmus year at the University of Leeds, UK. Exchange semester at Boston College, MA, USA.

Skills

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