I'm Sam Richell-Smith, and I'm passionate about
Creating solutions that make a positive difference in people's lives
Tech Stack
Experience
Software Engineer Intern → Developer @ Figured
Worked as an intern across a 22-person engineering team and was kept on part-time after the internship. Work spanned the full stack across a Laravel/PHP and Vue.js codebase, including contributing to a Vue 2 to Vue 3 migration, building an AI-powered merge conflict detector deployed on Kubernetes with Slack integration, and improving user export performance with a Redis caching layer.
- PHP
- Laravel
- Vue.js
- JavaScript
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- Redis
- Docker
- Kubernetes
Software Developer @ WDCC
Worked in a 10-person agile team to build a full-stack investment platform for the UoA Investment Club and its 1500+ members, featuring a live stock tracker, Google OAuth, Stripe payments, event management, and a custom CMS. After shipping the project, I was elected to the WDCC executive team as Tech Executive, now responsible for building and maintaining club apps, infrastructure and event sites across the organisation.
- TypeScript
- React
- Next.js
- MongoDB
- Tailwind
Software Developer @ UoA Swedish Club
As a co-founder of the UoA Swedish Club, I built internal tooling to keep the executive team coordinated as we scaled from a handful of people to 50+ members. This included a Go REST API and full-stack dashboard for task management and organisational oversight, with full test coverage across routing, business logic, and edge cases, containerised with Docker for deployment.
- Go
- TypeScript
- React
- Tailwind
- Docker
Projects
Distributed Job Scheduler
A Go-based job scheduling system featuring a heap-based priority queue, worker thread pools with concurrent execution, and chunked parallel processing. Includes Redis caching, PostgreSQL persistence for job metrics, and a React frontend for job management.
- Go
- React
- TypeScript
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Docker
UoA Investment Club Platform
Working within a 10-person agile team to build a platform tracking the club's NZX/ASX portfolio and serving 1500+ members. Implemented Google OAuth and domain verification for membership sign-ups, integrated Stripe payments for event and competition access, and used Payload CMS for articles, bulletins, and event management.
- TypeScript
- React
- Next.js
- MongoDB
- Tailwind
High-Performance Time-Series Database
An in-memory columnar storage engine for financial tick data, built in C++17. Features delta encoding for timestamp compression, binary search indexing for O(log n) range queries, and achieves sub-millisecond latency over 10M+ data points with 17-30x speedup versus naive baseline.
- C++
- CMake
OHIF Viewer Zip Export Extension
An open-source extension for the OHIF medical imaging viewer. Adds a custom ViewMode and toolbar button that instantly packages the active DICOM image and key study/patient metadata into a ZIP file, generated and downloaded directly in the browser.
- React
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- Yarn
Options Pricing Engine
A Black-Scholes pricing library in C++17 with analytical Greeks (Δ, Γ, ν, Θ) and a vectorised batch pricer at 17.8M contracts/sec, exposed via pybind11 Python bindings. Applied to live SPY options chain data to extract implied volatility per strike via Newton-Raphson, plotting the volatility smile and IV surface to reveal where Black-Scholes' constant-volatility assumption breaks down.
- C++
- Python
Swedish Club Management Dashboard
Created a custom REST API in Go to manage tasks for club executives. Implemented a frontend dashboard interface to allow users to easily create, sort, and complete tasks, and clearly alert users to overdue and upcoming tasks.
- React
- TypeScript
- Go
- Tailwind
Real-Time Chat App
A MERN stack application enabling real-time messaging. Key features include user authentication, dynamic chat updates with Socket.io, and a customisable user interface with theme settings.
- React
- Node.js
- MongoDB
- JavaScript
- Socket.io
- Tailwind
Operator Activity Management System
Java CLI tool to manage tourist activity operators and reviews, featuring multi-type reviews, search/filtering, endorsement and resolution of feedback, and location-based activity recommendations.
- Java
- JUnit
- Maven
Swedish Club Discord Bot
A Discord bot developed to promote the University of Auckland Swedish Club. Features include automated event announcements, member engagement through interactive commands, and integration with club resources.
- Python
- Discord API
Global Route Optimizer
A backend-focused Java application that uses graph theory and a Breadth-First Search (BFS) algorithm to calculate the shortest, most fuel-efficient route between two countries on a Risk-inspired world map. Provides detailed continent-based fuel consumption reports and highlights the highest-usage continent.
- Java
- JUnit
- Maven
Contact
Let's build
something together.
I'm always keen to talk about new projects, engineering roles, or just to connect. Whether you have something in mind or just want to say hello, my inbox is always open.