Andrew Berls

I graduated with a BS CS in 2014. While I was at UCSB I interned with Invoca in Santa Barbara, and then at Causes.com in San Francisco. After graduation I moved from Santa Barbara to San Francisco, where I started a small software consulting firm and worked with a financial services company. Shortly afterwards, I was convinced to join a young startup focused on predictive analytics as engineer #1. While I was there I wrote software to perform machine learning and big data analytics, and took on a huge amount of responsibility in a fast-paced environment with a tiny team. I also got the chance to apply the concepts I learned in my senior Compilers course on a project, which was immensely useful.

In 2016 the startup was acquired by Square, where I currently work. I work in the company’s Capital division, which gives loans to businesses that are processing payments with Square. As a Platform Engineer, my responsibility is to design and build the software infrastructure and financial systems that power all of Capital and facilitate billions of dollars in loans. Working on Capital has given me the opportunity to dive into both the fascinatingly complex world of finance, as well as the technology required to solve hard problems at huge scale.