Portfolio
Christian Espinoza
Senior software engineer with end-to-end product ownership, currently building AI-powered features and realtime systems at 4LeafLabs. Open to select freelance projects.
About
About me
Software engineer with 8+ years shipping web and mobile products: first as a freelancer for clients across several industries, now at 4LeafLabs, where I lead product and engineering for restaurant technology.
Lately that means shipping AI features like a menu builder that turns physical menus into digital ones, fully rewriting our Clover Kitchen Display app in Flutter, and standing up a realtime backend with Centrifugo. On the product side, I help close strategic partnerships and ship self-serve onboarding and UX improvements.
Outside of work I build side projects (a finance tracker, a Catan timer) and I'm usually designing or 3D-printing something, sometimes for my cats. I care about privacy, accessibility, and interfaces that respect the people using them.
Experience
Building products that ship.
Five years leading product and engineering at 4LeafLabs, building restaurant tech with AI features and realtime systems, plus three earlier years of freelance work across food, hospitality, legal, and marketing.
4LeafLabs
Senior Software Engineer · Product Lead
2021 - Present
Key achievements
- Designed and shipped an AI menu builder that converts physical menus into structured digital ones, using Gemini Flash 3 with structured outputs via OpenRouter.
- Fully rewrote the Clover Kitchen Display app in Flutter with a modern UI/UX, backed by a new realtime backend built with Centrifugo and deployed with Docker.
- Redesigned the caching architecture of a kitchen display proxy server, cutting external API calls from 200+ req/s to under 40 req/s.
- Drove product initiatives: helped close strategic partnerships and shipped self-serve quick-start wizards and UX improvements across our products.
- Built an Android session handler with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose to unify account state across apps.
Freelance
Full Stack Developer
2018 - 2021 · 3 years
Key achievements
- Delivered multiple client projects end to end across food, hospitality, HR, legal and marketing, handling discovery, design, build and handoff.
- Built an e-commerce platform with a custom dashboard for managing products, orders and fulfillment.
- Developed a corporate website with a custom WordPress theme and CMS workflows for a law firm.
- Shipped a job board platform with a custom admin panel, integrated into an existing WordPress site via a tailored plugin.
- Designed and built a marketing agency site, plus a presentation site with event management, blog and gallery for a hospitality chamber.
Contact
Let's connect
Open to select freelance projects and interesting collaborations. Tell me about your project using the form below and it lands straight in my inbox.