My story with AppFolio goes way back. It all started with me joining a data science capstone project class at UCSB. I ended up doing that project with AppFolio.
And it ended up being very worth it, since a few months into the project, my AppFolio mentor offered me an internship!
On my internship I came in with a goal: do my best work and hopefully get a return offer. And I think I did amazing work, and after those 3 months I got the return offer that I wanted. If you’re on a visa, like me, a full-time offer is a game changer; it allows you to stay in the US, and that definitely took a lot of the stress out. I finally could enjoy my time at school knowing that I didn’t have to leave the US if I didn’t want to after graduating.
Working at AppFolio was one of the best opportunities of my life. I can honestly say that I started knowing little to nothing, but each year I learned so much. A few of the projects I worked on:
Invoice Processing: a product at AppFolio that extracts information from invoices (amount, due date, etc.) using LLMs. The idea is that it saves customers a bunch of manual work, and we created pipelines that process tens of millions of invoices each year. This was pre-GPT in 2021, so we were fine-tuning our own models.
Bank Feed: a bank reconciliation product that matches transactions in AppFolio against those in customers’ banks to make sure that the books are clean. I developed, trained, and evaluated the matching algorithm, and then helped deploy it and set up all the monitoring and observability for the project. I also helped with the integration with the main AppFolio application.
AI Platform: we developed the whole AI infrastructure for AppFolio to make it super easy to train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor ML models. This is used by all the teams at AppFolio and handles around a billion requests per year.
RealmX: the AI assistant at AppFolio that answers data questions like “List all tenants that didn’t pay rent” and allows users to perform bulk actions like “send all of them an email saying that they need to pay rent.” I worked on all stages of this project. It started as a small hack day project and got everyone’s attention, so we created a team to bring it to production. I helped with the agent, the specific tools, the data engineering aspects to stream the data that the LLM queries, the backend, and the frontend. I helped the project go from idea to production and was there both when it didn’t work at all and customers were mad to the present, where we are going live to every customer and it’s the number one priority at AppFolio.
Most importantly, AppFolio gave me the chance to work on everything I wanted to. I was very open with my manager that I wanted to learn as much as possible, and he helped make that possible. I couldn’t be more grateful for everything I learned, the people I met, and all the great memories that I have. I started as a college student and left as an engineer that feels capable of building almost anything. And that is priceless, and for that I will always be grateful :)