Jackson Lawrence, Software Engineer
Jackson Lawrence
Software Engineer · San Francisco, CA
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Work & projects
- Waltz2026–now
- AnyForm2026–now
- The Cratest2026–now
- Oracle2025–now
- Trailblaze2021–2024
- KoiStream2020–2021
- CareerFoundry2022–2023
- TEDx Design Tech2019
AI & agents
Product & frontend
Backend & data
Cloud
Trailblaze
Work · Co-Founder & CTO · January 2021 – April 2024
A job app that helped students and young adults land their first jobs. I co-founded it and led the engineering, and it grew past 10,000 users in under a year.
Built with
- TypeScript
- React / Next.js
- React Native
- UI/UX & Figma
- Design Thinking
- Go
- PostgreSQL / SQL
- REST & GraphQL
- AWS
The app's Discover screen from when it was still called Grindstone.
Why we started it
My co-founder and I had looked for part-time work ourselves, and the job sites we tried weren't built for someone looking for a first job. In January 2021 we started building an app for students and young adults in that spot. It was called Grindstone at first, and we rebranded to Trailblaze later.
What I built
I was the CTO. I built the app's screens in React Native, along with the services behind it and the database, and I worked the designs out in Figma first. The company's public website was mine too, designed and built in Next.js.
The Discover screen let you search for a job or browse by category, such as part-time, retail or restaurant work, and showed the newest jobs with their city and pay.
How it went
We started with part-time, entry-level work. Over time we moved into the jobs that start a career, such as internships. The app grew to over 10,000 users in less than a year after launch.
I stepped away in April 2024 to finish my degree, and went on to work as a software engineer.
What I took from it
At Trailblaze I was building for real users, thousands of them. At a startup that small I also did a lot that wasn't development, such as marketing and outreach.