Colten Appleby

Software Engineer

About Me

I’m a systems engineer turned product builder who has spent my career turning operational problems into products people rely on, from ERP rollouts at WeWork to a community solar platform that grew to 60,000+ subscribers. I work where users, data, and engineering meet, and I’m now bringing that founder-level ownership to product management.

Skills

Product: Product Discovery, User Research, MVP Scoping & Definition, Requirements Definition, Roadmap Prioritization, Sprint Planning, Process Mapping, Cross-Functional Leadership
AI: AI-Assisted Development, Agent Orchestration, Prompt and Context Engineering, ML (OMSCS)
Technical: Python, TypeScript, SQL, Next.js, React, Azure, Palantir Foundry, SAP ByDesign

Experience

SkyFusion

Founding Software Engineer

2026 - Present

skyfusion.ai

Partner with the CEO and CTO to build the company from zero, translating the founding concept into an MVP plan and work orders for an 8-week build.

Drive pre-product market-fit discovery for an AI compute network: benchmark adjacent companies and prototype three candidate business models (hosted inference API, GPU rental, and vertical model hosting) to determine what the company sells.

Architect the MVP for rapid product experimentation: a stable control plane that routes AI inference across residential GPU nodes, paired with an AI-built inference layer the team reshapes as each product bet is tested.

Solar Landscape

Software Engineer

2024 - 2026

solarlandscape.com

Led product and engineering for a community solar platform that replaced the company’s third-party partner suite by year-end as committed, reaching 60k+ subscribers and $8.5M in projected 2026 revenue.

Designed the platform to scale across markets and subscriber types, with multilingual sign-up flows and state-specific data collection, expanding from NJ to Maryland required no rebuild.

Ran weekly grooming and sprint planning for an 8-person operations team and 3 engineers, pitching priorities and building consensus on the roadmap.

Shipped an electricity-usage prediction model that automated allocation for 30k subscribers, replacing the manual process competitors still rely on; iterated with operations on edge cases and recurring utility billing errors.

Found a 10-hour-per-week payroll bottleneck in HR; mapped the current and future process, validated the fix with a Python prototype, and shipped a self-service labor-cost app, eliminating 520 hours of manual work a year.

Katalyst Digital Infrastructure

Data Engineer to Software Engineer

2021 - 2023

katalystdi.com

Led data onboarding for construction teams of Fortune 100 hyperscalers. Aggregating over 30 TBs of data producing insights that lead to $50mm in savings. (Python, PySpark, Palantir Foundry)

Diagnosed permission-workflow friction with end users; shipped a notification system that cut task time 60%.

Iterated with the client-facing service team on a schedule-tracking feature that drove a 30% increase in customer acquisition.

WR Liggett LLC

ERP Technology Integrator

January 2021 - November 2021

Recruited by WeWork’s ERP implementation partner after the WeWork rollout to help a new client implement a $50M SAP ByDesign ERP.

Orchestrated the migration of a legacy PostgreSQL database to a new ERP system. Data cleaning and conversion with Python.

WeWork

ERP Systems Integration Project Manager

May 2017 - December 2020

Promoted from Intern to Analyst to Associate to Lead.

Built a supply-chain model covering $100M in spend and presented it to leadership, driving staff leveling and a $5M reduction in raw-material spend.

Co-launched a 70-person prefabrication subsidiary; ran requirements workshops across production, supply chain, and finance to deliver a $20M SAP ByDesign ERP.

Served as ERP and data lead for WeWork’s 25-person Construction Technology Studio, which used analytics, field technology, and BIM to cut construction costs and improve schedules, safety, and collaboration.

Education

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

BSc Industrial & Systems Engineering

2014 - 2018

Organizations: Varsity Cross-Country Team, Lambda Chi Alpha, Club Badminton

Georgia Institute of Technology

Online Masters of Science in Computer Science - OMSCS

Expected 2028

Relevant Classes: 6601: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Trading, Machine Learning

A Little More About Me

Alongside my interests in software and data engineering some of my other interests and hobbies are: Baseball, Sabermetrics, Skiing, Craft Beer, Running, Hiking, Photography, Travelling, Pitch (Card Game).