FOUNDING ENGINEER
Built a product to a $187M acquisition.
Building the next one.
Founding Engineer
Rochester, New York, USA
STEF OLTHOFF
[0] About
I’m building Bloom, a workspace for professional creatives. Before that I was at Wisely and NOAA.
I care about getting in front of users early and building from what they tell me, not what I assume. Most of my best work started with a conversation, not a spec.
[1] BLOOM
Founding engineer since late 2025. Bloom captures references, ideas, and assets for creative professionals and turns them into a shared, structured system that teams can reason from.
[2] WISELY
Concept to Acquisition
Wisely is a guest intelligence platform for restaurants. Acquired by Olo for $187M in 2021.
I joined in 2018 as one of six employees.
The Problem
A restaurant group with 100 locations gets thousands of reviews across Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Yelp. Nobody reads them all. The ones that matter—"the new bartender in Chicago is rude," "the pad thai changed"—get buried.
What I Built
Sentiment—a machine-learning platform that reads every review and tells you what's actually going on. It generated $1.1M in annual revenue, one-third of the company's total.
Sentiment ingests reviews from 10+ sources in real time via webhooks and distributed queueing. An NLP engine parses emotion and subject matter, surfacing answers to questions like: "How do customers feel about the new pad thai dish in New Orleans vs. Chicago?" or "Is service quality trending up or down over the last six months?"
With 10+ API integrations, managers can monitor and respond to every review online from a single dashboard.
Post-acquisition, Wisely now powers guest intelligence for 600+ restaurant brands.
[3] NOAA
Responding to Risk
TRACER is a coastal emergency simulation tool funded by NOAA. Discovery to live MVP in four weeks.
The Mission
Coastal communities face increasing threats from oil spills, algal blooms, and drifting debris. Preparing for these events requires more than static reports—it requires the ability to simulate future scenarios and practice response strategies before lives and ecosystems are at risk. NOAA funded the development of a web application capable of running physics-based simulations of these emergencies, with the goal of equipping communities to respond faster and more effectively.
What I Built
I served as Design Engineer—running discovery sessions with coastal response authorities, conceptualizing the product, and creating interactive Figma wireframes to prototype in-app flows. Visual prototypes clarified requirements and validated the design before engineering began.
I then led full-stack development—UI, API, and database schema. Discovery session to live MVP in four weeks.
2D Particle Flow
3D Particle Cloud