Chazona Baum

Tingles Labs is a pre-seed dating app startup that reimagines the modern dating app as an automated concierge guiding daters throughout the lifecycle of their relationship, from automatically scheduled in-person dates in public places through personalized nudges to continue the work of keeping the spark alive.

I founded the startup and was responsible for everything from understanding the competitive and regulatory landscape, designing and implementing the matchmaking service MVP, iterating on marketing website presence based on feedback and data around messaging, and customer discovery calls with typically 5-10 prospects each week.

In 2024, Tingles Labs was accepted to the Founder Institute accelerator program.

Following a combination of trends in responses from women vs men and broader macro environment of antagonism between men and women in the United States that make it clear that changing the way women meet men for the first time cannot make them safer, I am pivoting Tingles Labs to something akin to Bluesky for dating. This will become a service that can be open sourced, self-hostable and capable of federation, with tools to give users greater visibility and control over their matchmaking algorithm, provide a virtual “whisper network” to ensure people are held accountable for bad behavior, and assist them in finding 4B-like companionate relationships if they prefer. So I am winding this down to a part-time, longer-term project.

Untapped (formerly Canvas and recently acquired by Podium Education) is a B2B/B2C talent marketplace with ATS integrations, pipeline analytics and social/community features.

I oversaw a transitional period leading through our successful acquisition by Podium Education. Among the accomplishments Engineering rallied to achieve, we landed two drastically improved matchmaking systems for recruiters to find the most suitable candidates and for candidates to find jobs they were truly interested in, and we created a brand new browser extension that made applying to jobs faster and easier.

One of the most critical functions I absorbed was Security. During my time as Head of Engineering, we maintained 0 critical and 0 high severity findings from penetration testing and I led a successful SOC II recertification despite substantially reduced headcount. I partnered with Sales to provide reviews of and answer questions about our security policies, practices and compliance records to customers as part of their vendor management processes.

I was brought onboard to the Candidate Experience team to act as a technical partner to the team’s new Product Manager, to act as an advocate for our candidate users, to own our mobile app development and strategy and to ensure our frontend development was subject to the same engineering rigor we had begun to require for backend work. When needed, I rolled up my sleeves and shipped code to get us across the finish line, but attempted as much as possible to stay out of the critical path.

In my first 90 days, I tripled the deployment frequency of our frontend work, took frontend code reviews from an activity typically performed by 1-2 engineers to one everyone was expected to meaningfully contribute to, and reduced the frequency of merge conflicts by aligning our frontend engineers on shared git workflow practices.

Within EPD I worked closely with my partners in Product and Design to move Candidate Experience from a feature factory to a pod where everything we shipped had impact our engineers could articulate and be proud of. I successfully pushed to include our engineers in brainstorming, pointed out “small but mighty” ways we could accomplish oversized impact with less engineering effort (several of which were ultimately implemented), and took an extremely selective stance toward what work we chose to do as a team. We developed a new reputation as a pod that got things done and almost always had something new to bring to demo day. I took ownership of key Product initiatives and even applied my L&D spend toward strengthening my Product and Design capabilities, allowing me to provide tactical and strategic Product support when we experienced the absence of a Product Manager.

Among our other Engineering leads, I worked with them to enact the swift and comprehensive rebrand from Canvas to Untapped, advised on frontend conventions and infrastructure, and contributed to a culture of continuous improvement. In one example, I created custom Jira dashboards to help me better understand engineering productivity—after experimenting with a solution for my own pod, I created documentation and shared with my peers to help them adopt the solution for themselves. (I also shared this documentation with ICs so to democratize this understanding and allow them to better catch issues with their own workflows.) And I partnered with a group of engineers to devise a new interview loop for full-stack engineers that prioritized real-world skills over LeetCode-style live-coding problems.

I also worked closely with Marketing to manage our Growth Engineering work, and later to prioritize and tackle SEO-related technical debt. As our priorities became more focused, I proposed and led a successful effort to train our Marketing team to implement changes to our Webflow-based marketing site, so that they could have agency instead of having to rely on Engineering for content changes and launches.

And the part of my work I was most proud of was building trust with engineers within my own team and throughout the department as someone who genuinely had their interests and careers in mind. I championed improvements to onboarding to reduce unnecessary stress and to our leveling system to improve clarity and allow for more than one definition of success for Staff-level ICs. Through never wavering from sincerity and commitment to my engineers, I was able to retain high performers through two challenging reductions in force. (On a fun note, my team buildings consistently made other teams jealous. 😉)

MAXX Potential is a tech talent incubator tasked with providing the first genuine rung of the ladder of transformational tech careers, often to scrappy folks with initiative but nontraditional backgrounds. The work is real, as is the pay and the business outcomes for customers.

As Principal Technologist and Site Lead for our Norfolk operations, my primary function was as engineering manager for as many as 8 concurrent teams staffed with between 2-10 engineers across a wide range of technologies (JavaScript, Vue.js, Laravel, Ruby on Rails, Django, C#.NET, WordPress, Sitefinity, Sitecore, native Android and iOS, React Native, MySQL, Postgres, MS SQL Server).

The reality was that as the sole leader for my location, my job was really “do whatever it takes (without dropping integrity) to make this office successful”, so I owned a blend of functions at the local level such as solutions architecture, customer relationship management and the hiring lifecycle. Anything from someone falling at work to a sudden visit from the fire marshal.

I slashed onboarding time for our largest customer by 67% by coordinating the streamlining and updating of existing documentation, leading them to ask us for two additional engagements worth $155,000 annually.

For another customer, I led a team in auditing and updating 750 websites built on WordPress for ADA accessibility compliance, leveraging automation to improve efficiency. We reduced front-end development time per website for that customer by 60% through the application of shared templates and components and improvement of build tools, leading them to increase the scope of our engagement from 2 to 9 engineers.

This was also my first opportunity to manage another manager—I coached them toward qualifying for a technical management role and then helped them grow toward increases in pay and responsibilities.

I started at MAXX Potential as an apprentice, completing projects for customers ranging from tiny nonprofits to Fortune 500 companies. Acting as a software engineering contractor for these companies, I completed a number of engagements ranging from 2 weeks to a few months.

In one of my most fun projects, I wrote a Ruby API for aggregation and statistical analysis of millions of points of IoT sensor data in order to help a local climate organization evaluate vendors. I interfaced directly with the vendors to determine the appropriate API contract and provided a summary of the results with the source data.

I also acted as flex R&D capacity for one enterprise customer, researching and creating a proof of concept demonstrating the capabilities and limitations of emerging technologies for consideration by their Operations team. The solution integrated web-based augmented reality, HTML5 Canvas for QR code scanning and a speech recognition search interface. After presenting the solution onsite, I separated out a portion of it for integration into their production website.

The most frequent projects I worked on involved establishing or improving upon websites leveraging WordPress for small businesses and nonprofits. Most needed payment integrations via Stripe API, Authorize.net or Paypal in addition to responsive web design. One example nonprofit customer had an existing site for more than a decade with no prior CMS—migrating them to a more maintainable web presence required organizing their 500+ pages into a cohesive information architecture and creating custom features for user-generated content.

A few months after I started, the manager responsible for my office left the company—the absence challenged me to fill the gaps left and provide oversight on the team’s projects. In addition to my technical work, I took ownership of customer communications, coached other apprentices toward achieving advancement goals, provided training and estimates for technical projects.

I majored in sociology with a minor in Japanese language and culture, but ran out of money and became homeless for a time which ended my college path.

Prior to having to drop out, I served as an officer of the school’s organization for LGBTQIA students and allies. I successfully maintained this position throughout the period of homelessness despite the hardships.

Going awfully far back here, but I obtained an Advanced Studies Diploma with a 3.5 GPA.

Beyond academics, I was heavily involved in chorus consistently from the fourth grade onward, including being selected for District ensembles. Prior to moving to the city I graduated in, I served on a teen advisory council for my local library.