Dan O'Riordan
Software Engineer @ Paid AI
Building things that sometimes work. Cambridge engineer turned startup generalist. Currently making AI earn its keep.
About
Veteran of numerous successful and failed startups and scaleups. I like building products from scratch, figuring out what users actually need, and shipping fast. Most comfortable when the problem is ambiguous and the team is small.
Experience
Paid
2025 – PresentSoftware Engineer
Building the monetization engine for AI.
Lightspeed, EQT, Sequoia.
Upsolve AI (YC W24)
2024 – 2025Founding Engineer
AI Agents, LLMs, RAG, Context, State Machines, Memory, Tool Calling - All the buzzwords.
General Catalyst, Samsung Next Ventures, Soma Capital.
Peckwater Brands
2022 – 2023Product Engineer
Seed → Series A, 20 → 100 people
hyperTunnel
Summer 2020 & Summer 2021Engineer
Deep tech, civil engineering
HM Government
Summer 2019Software Engineer
Cheltenham
Education
University of Cambridge
MEng · 2017 – 2021