My pretty face!

Hi, I'm Emi!

I'm a web developer with a head for business, a passion for what's right, and a wide range of experience—React, Rails, Go, PHP, enterprise integrations, leadership, and more!

I've been building production apps for more than a decade, focused on helping people as best I can. In my 5 years at Khan Academy, an education technology nonprofit, I focused in B2B partnerships: working across teams to drive and successfully launch multiple third-party test-prep experiences, and our first-ever enterprise product for school districts. And I've run a complex open-source Ruby on Rails project for 15 years, doing my best to bring delight to users and stay in touch with their needs, as the product and tech landscape continue to ever-change!

I have a lifelong passion for the collaborative power of the web, and a clarity for how community passion and business strategy work together—and I understand how each conversation and line of code contribute to those successes. And I've seen firsthand how major architectural choices, especially integrations with third-party platforms, play out on large teams and long timescales. I know the good and the bad, how to manage that complexity, and how to avoid the worst traps altogether.

After shifting to part-time for a few years to help manage my household's changing needs, I'm eager to return to a full-time role again!

I'm especially interested in roles that touch any of the following:

If that's you, please reach out—I'm excited to learn more about how I can help!

↓ resume down here! ↓

My pretty face! Emi Dunn-Rankin

(they/them)
jobs@matchu.dev
Last updated: November 2025
Location: Portland, Oregon (US)

Vimeo

Education: B.S. Computer Science, Rice 2015

Senior Software Engineer: Trust & Safety

2025
  • Led migration from legacy moderation platform to off-the-shelf solution Cinder. This increased moderator efficiency by ~2×, surfaced rich data for operational improvement, and enabled solutions for automated content scanning and enforcement at scale.
  • Led large-scale refactor of underlying moderation infrastructure, unifying many years of redundant content flagging and deactivation pathways into a single well-tested module. This drastically simplified the codebase, resolved multiple compliance issues, and caused zero behavioral regressions.
  • Implemented integrations with GIFCT to detect extremist content, and DSA for compliance with EU regulation.

Ministry Architects

Senior Software Consultant

2022–2024
  • Guided the growing company through developing their first in-house B2B software product, from early prototyping to final release. Helped the team avoid the classic mistakes, and stay lean and focused on their way to a successful launch.
  • Modernized a decade-old unmaintained Rails app to use the latest standards, align with the company's new branding, and integrate with their new email marketing systems.
  • Revived a legacy WordPress system that had become a black-box to its own staff. Discovered key functionality spread across both off-the-shelf plugins and custom code, and trained the team to use and maintain the system going forward.

Khan Academy

Senior Software Engineer: Districts Core Platform

2019–2020
  • Led Khan Academy's first-ever enterprise product launch, implementing deep integrations between district rostering systems, standardized testing partners, and our own student and teacher products.
  • Successfully launched to 6 districts with 300k+ students simultaneously—happy back-to-school! Worked closely with on-site sales reps to manage customer feedback, and quickly adjusted our systems to match.

Senior Software Engineer: Test Prep Partnerships

2018
  • Led 8 engineers working on two Test Prep products at once: our flagship SAT prep app, and a new flexible platform to easily support new partnerships.
  • Successfully launched new LSAT and Praxis Core test prep experiences, smoothly and ahead of schedule, with consistently excellent team happiness ratings.

Software Engineer: Test Prep & Philanthropy

2015–2017
  • Overhauled Khan Academy's donation UX, directly enabling millions of dollars of additional annual revenue.

Dress to Impress

Founder & Lead Engineer

2009–Present
  • 16-year fun community project for popular virtual pet site Neopets, to help users design and test fancy outfits for their pets! Served over 30k users monthly in the early 2010s, and still 15k monthly today.
  • Built on the latest Ruby on Rails, with a modern React-based frontend, communicating via GraphQL. (Originally a simple PHP app—evolving steadily over time!)
  • Neopets contracted us to integrate their SSO into our app, so that we could better help fill the gaps in their legacy experience and serve power-users as effectively as possible. Powered by OAuth and OpenID Connect.

Conversation starters: Ask me about…

Sysadmin cost savings!

I was hosting some parts of Dress to Impress in the cloud via Vercel—until I got the notice that, due to a billing overhaul, my next month's bill would be 40× larger!

I quickly moved to redeploy these features to a Linux VPS on Linode, using Ansible for reproducible deployments, and ended up decreasing our monthly bill by 2× overall.

Security analysis!

Back when I started my coding journey, I would frequently help my online communities find and resolve critical security vulnerabilities. (Most login forms I saw would let anyone be an admin!)

Today, I'm revitalizing that passion by working toward a certification in security analysis—and leveraging that knowledge toward more-secure application deployments today!

Tech education!

Neopets is where a lot of people learn the basics of HTML and CSS, to customize their personal pages—but they often get stuck there. So, I'm developing a curriculum to help Neopets coders level-up their skills!

We're focusing on web fundamentals, helping people build up to whatever tool they need: first static site generators, then basic server-side code, and finally the beginnings of Ruby on Rails.