Louis Foster
I build software. I play bass.
About
Engineering Manager and full-stack engineer with 10+ years of startup experience building and leading product teams at scale. Proven track record of owning the full product engineering lifecycle — from architecture and delivery to roadmap and team growth — at companies whose core products I helped build from the ground up.
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Early mover in AI tooling: built customer-facing data labeling infrastructure at a seed-stage AI startup in 2018, and independently shipped a multi-model generative AI pipeline (GPT-4, Stability AI, ElevenLabs, Blender) in 2023. Comfortable across the stack — strong in JavaScript on the frontend, capable in backend and cloud infrastructure, and actively building in Rust for Android and real-time audio processing.
Outside of professional work, I maintain a hardware/software side project ecosystem centred on the electric bass: MCU-driven MIDI interfaces, OpenCV fiducial marker controllers, GPU-based UI rendering and a real-time DSP engine — spanning embedded systems, computer vision, and mobile audio. This work informs how I think about products and systems.
Targeting Staff Engineer or Engineering Manager roles at AI-adjacent product companies where strong product instincts, shipping velocity, and cross-functional ownership matter as much as technical depth.
I'm always open to a conversation about the right next thing.
Conference talks
I've spoken of my past projects at various conferences.
Rapid Prototyping Physical Interfaces with Web Serial and Cheap MCUs
When I first started getting into controllers, I found that there was the Web Serial API. This allowed serial communication between Chrome browsers and devices. I presented a talk on my exploration of the JavaScript ecosystem, MCUs, and serial.
Live Streaming Platform As An Instrument, Experience And Pastime
During covid a long term project of mine reached a kind of peak, with it culminating in the rivalium aka _noisecrypt platform. I had explored this idea of a "sonic cyberspace" over my formative engineering years. I had eventually conceived of this streaming platform that creates collage-like soundscapes in 2019. By the time I had something usable, covid was bringing streaming into the fore. So, a bit of attention was put on my work. Here is one of the many workshops I did on this project.
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Here are links to the various conferences I've presented at.
FOSDEM 2022: Rapid Prototyping Physical Interfaces with Web Serial and Cheap MCUs
Web Audio Conference 2021: Live Streaming Platform As An Instrument, Experience And Pastime
Vasulka Kitchen 2021: Taming of the Stream: Performance with(in) protocol
NEXT Festival 2020: Live Streaming Platform As An Instrument, Experience And Pastime
NIME 2020: Live Streaming Platform As An Instrument, Experience And Pastime
Experience
Skribble Remote (Switzerland/Germany) Dec 2020 – Oct 2025
Swiss seed-stage digital signature platform processing millions of legally-binding signatures annually across thousands of business customers and tens of thousands of users. The primary web application — the product customers interact with daily — was built and evolved by the team I led and contributed to throughout my tenure.
- Led a 4-person product engineering team, improving throughput, reducing bug count, and sharpening delivery estimates.
- Served dual role as Technical Product Owner: defined and maintained product vision and roadmap, working closely with engineering and business stakeholders.
- Delivered key product features including FDA 21 CFR Part 11-compliant signatures, multi-document signature requests, and payment system integration.
- Managed 1:1s, performance reviews, hiring, and upward reporting; successfully hired two high-quality contributors to the team.
- Led a team of 2-3 engineers; collaborated with Product to scope initiatives for faster delivery and introduced planning and estimation processes to address long-term technical debt.
- Improved cross-functional visibility into engineering operations and accelerated feature delivery for the product team.
- Built a high-performance signature image rendering service.
- Led migration of the primary web application from JavaScript to TypeScript, improving type safety and developer experience across the codebase.
- Improved integrated testing systems and test coverage; delivered numerous features and fixes across Python, Java, Node.js, and TypeScript.
super.AI Berlin, Germany Dec 2018 – Dec 2020
Seed-stage AI data labeling and management startup. The customer-facing dashboard I designed and built from scratch became the core platform through which customers managed projects, configured labeling workflows, and processed what grew into millions of data labels annually.
- First Berlin hire; designed and built the company's customer-facing data labeling and management dashboard from the ground up using React and AWS.
- Architected a scalable frontend codebase while growing the team, enabling onboarding of new enterprise customers within week-long delivery sprints. Tools built during this period went on to process millions of data labels annually.
- Worked directly with data scientists to build labeling and deployment tools using state-of-the-art ML methods, improving label accuracy and reducing turnaround time.
- Involved in hiring, onboarding, and critical architecture decisions; worked with contractors and customers directly.
Airteam Sydney, Australia Sep 2014 – Jul 2018
Digital product agency serving startups and enterprise clients.
- Built Angular and React web applications and hybrid mobile applications for a range of startup and enterprise clients.
- Worked across JavaScript (Ionic), Java (Android), Swift (iOS), Node.js, and Python.
- Applied a background in industrial design to contribute to product design and UX alongside engineering delivery.