WebSocket-based AI onboarding engine

Understory ran an internal AI hackathon. I built a FastAPI service with native WebSocket support: a client submitted a company URL, the service scraped it live, and streamed GPT-4o's structured extraction of company, experience, and image details back over the socket as each stage finished, so a new client watched their own account build itself in real time instead of staring at a spinner.

Won outright, and instead of getting shelved as a demo, the team containerized it, shipped it through ECR, and took it straight into production. It's still live, still running more than a year after I left the company.

Nobody assigned me this project, and that's the part that stands out most looking back. A hackathon is the closest thing a day job gets to the kind of self-directed building I did later as an independent engineer, and Understory trusting an unplanned, self-initiated build enough to ship it into production says something about both the result and the environment I was working in.