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Faye Hayes

Open to founding & senior engineering roles

I'm the engineer startups hire first.

Ten years building production systems for early-stage teams: two-sided marketplaces and payments, K-12 SaaS, and AI products grounded in real company data. I own the work end to end, from the first requirements conversation to the AWS bill.

Let's talk→See my work
Faye Hayes
years shipping production software
10
years shipping production software
founding-engineer roles
4
founding-engineer roles
platform migrations led
2
platform migrations led

01 — What I bring

A product-minded engineer for the first ten hires.

Small teams need someone who can take an idea from a requirements conversation to a system that holds up in production. That's the job I've done four times.

01

Zero to one, then to scale

I've led two platform migrations, moving Strongsuit off Airtable and Squarespace and Cheersy off Sharetribe, onto custom systems the team actually owns.

MigrationsArchitectureMVPs
02

I own the whole stack

From Stripe Connect payouts and platform fees to AWS deploys on Elastic Beanstalk, RDS and CloudFront, and debugging production with Sentry. One engineer, from first commit to launch.

PaymentsAWSDevOps
03

AI grounded in real context

I've built customer-specific assistants augmented with company context and structured data, plus a Python scraping service that feeds them. RAG-certified, with a human in the loop.

RAGOpenAIAgents

Daily drivers

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Node.js
  • PostgreSQL
  • Prisma
  • GraphQL
  • AWS
  • Stripe Connect
  • OpenAI
  • RAG
  • Python

02 — Selected work

Ideas I've helped grow into shipped products.

Founding-engineer roles and studio engagements, each one a product brought confidently to production.

hilightedu.com
Hilight

Founding Engineer · Mar 2026 – Oct 2026

Hilight

A peer-recognition platform for K-12 teachers and staff.

  • Developed and maintained production features with the CTO, sharing implementation, code review and QA.
  • Implemented and refined role-based visibility and permissions to match how districts actually structure access.
TypeScriptReactNode.jsPostgreSQLSequelize
Read the case study→
cheersy.com
Cheersy

Founding Engineer · Nov 2024 – Feb 2026

Cheersy

A two-sided wedding marketplace connecting couples with day-of coordinators.

  • Led the migration from Sharetribe to a fully custom two-sided marketplace in Next.js, Node.js and TypeScript.
  • Designed Stripe Connect (Custom accounts) for secure client payments, manual coordinator payouts and platform-fee logic across multiple user roles.
Next.jsNode.jsTypeScriptStripe ConnectAWS
Read the case study→
arrow-ai.app
Arrow AI

Lead Engineer · via YoucoLabs · Jun 2023 – Feb 2025

Arrow AI

A marketing platform with customer-specific AI assistants and automated social publishing.

  • Integrated OpenAI APIs to power customer-specific AI assistants, augmenting responses with company context and structured data for relevance and accuracy.
  • Built a Python microservice that scrapes client websites to create context-aware AI agents.
Vue.jsNext.jsGraphQLPythonOpenAI
Read the case study→

03 — Ship log

Ten years, four first-engineer seats.

  1. Mar 2026 — Oct 2026 · K-12 SaaS

    Founding Engineer, Hilight

    • Shipped production features with the CTO across implementation, review and QA.
    • Built role-based visibility and permissions; supported Clever / ClassLink district onboarding.

  2. Nov 2024 — Feb 2026 · Marketplace · half-time

    Founding Engineer, Cheersy

    • Led the migration off Sharetribe to a custom Next.js / TypeScript marketplace.
    • Designed Stripe Connect payments, payouts and platform fees; owned AWS infrastructure.

  3. Nov 2021 — Present · Product studio

    Founder & Principal Engineer, YoucoLabs

    • Launch MVPs for early-stage founders, covering backend architecture, frontend UX and DevOps.
    • Arrow AI: grounded AI assistants, a scraping microservice and automated social publishing.

  4. Jan 2020 — Nov 2021

    Founding Software Engineer, Strongsuit

    • Led migration from Airtable and Squarespace to a custom platform for onboarding, data and internal workflows.
    • Designed early data pipelines to centralize operational data and reporting.

04 — Writing

Notes on building with AI.

How I think about LLMs in real products: grounding, guardrails, and keeping a human in the loop.

Mar 3, 2026 · 6 min

If It Can Be Rebuilt in a Weekend, It’s Not an AI Product. It’s a Demo.

There is a simple diagnostic I use when a founder tells me about their AI product.

Read→

Feb 23, 2026 · 2 min

Integrating AI? Keep a human in the loop

According to recent reporting from the Financial Times, Amazon’s internal AI coding agent was involved in multiple AWS outages, including one that lasted 13

Read→

Feb 19, 2026 · 4 min

Understanding Vector Databases

Vector databases live in a completely different lane. They don’t store data according to rows and columns in the traditional sense. Instead, they store

Read→
All writing→

05 — Contact

Hiring a founding or senior engineer? Let's talk.

I'm excited to join a small, ambitious team where I can own the product end to end. I read every message.

Building something and want a partner for an MVP or AI feature? I take on select projects too. Choose “Project work” in the form.

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