STEF OLTHOFF

Built a product to a $187M acquisition. Now building Bloom as employee #1.

Recent Projects
Bloom Pre-seed startup
Founding Engineer
  • Solo technical team for the first few months — 21,000+ references captured, 157 MAU, ~50% Week 1 retention among core users.
  • Shipped an AI messaging agent — users save and organize content over iMessage using natural language. Function-calling architecture with tool routing and eval framework.
  • Built the full billing stack — Stripe integration, entitlements, metering, storage enforcement.
Restaurant Sentiment Hospitality at scale
Lead Engineer at Wisely
  • Built Sentiment from concept to $1.1M ARR — one-third of company revenue. NLP engine ingesting reviews from 10+ sources in real time.
  • Product played a key role in Wisely's $187M acquisition by Olo in 2021. Now powers guest intelligence for 600+ restaurant brands.
NOAA Coastline Emergencies Responding to risk
Design Engineer at Tetra Tech
  • Led discovery, design, and full-stack development of a NOAA-funded coastal emergency simulation tool. Discovery session to live MVP in four weeks.
  • Built geospatial visualization and physics-based simulation UI for oil spills, debris tracking, and search-and-rescue scenarios used by coastal response authorities.
Technologies
TypeScript · React · Next.js · Node · PostgreSQL · pgvector · Redis · Docker · AWS · Cloudflare · Stripe · AI/LLMs · D3
Engineering History
Bloom Founding Engineer Nov 2025 – Present
Tetra Tech Design Engineer Jul 2023 – Sep 2025
NewFoundry Full-Stack Engineer Jun 2020 – Jun 2021
Wisely Lead Engineer, Sentiment Sep 2018 – Mar 2020
University of Michigan Software Engineer Sep 2017 – Sep 2018
Education
University of Michigan
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, 2018