Nevette A.
Bailey, Ph.D.

My path to engineering ran through a chemistry PhD at Columbia and a career as a professional ballet dancer. That's not a quirky footnote — it's the explanation for how I work.

Both fields demand the same things: precision under pressure, the ability to hold a complex system in your head while executing at the detail level, and an intolerance for approximation when accuracy is what the problem requires.

At Etsy I spent four years in monetization and payments — shipping an ads credit system that eliminated an entire category of support tickets, building campaign features that increased ad adoption by 32%, and leading a risk mitigation project that captured $700k in revenue. I was promoted twice in three years and mentored over a dozen engineers along the way.

At Gotham I was the first technical lead as VP of Engineering. I built the team, the infrastructure, and the processes from nothing — including a backup POS system after I identified a critical single point of failure that could have taken down sales during a high-volume event. I also designed and built the PoC for a data management system using GCP Cloud Functions and BigQuery to consolidate sales and inventory data from third-party integrations, which the team carried into production. CI/CD pipelines I established reduced delivery timelines by 50% and defect rates by 40%.

I'm currently building First On Screen, an independent research project and application for tracking media representation using self-identification-only data. It's built on a stack of third-party APIs — including Anthropic's — with human-in-the-loop verification and explicit constraints against automated production writes, because I think the question of who gets to define identity in AI systems deserves rigorous engineering, not shortcuts.

I bring senior IC execution depth and executive leadership experience. I can set technical direction, build the team to execute it, and write the code myself.