Senior engineer & founder

Sarah Goodroe

fintech, regulated lending, and applied AI

London, UK

Summary

Senior software engineer and founder who pairs hands-on building depth with team and product leadership. I founded and solo-built Uparity, a multi-tenant loan origination platform automating underwriting for Habitat for Humanity affiliates across the regulated US consumer-lending landscape.

Before that I led a cross-disciplinary engineering team at Airex, shipping an ML-driven SaaS product on IoT hardware, and earned a PhD at UCL in computational neuroscience — building full-stack research software and statistical/ML models of human behaviour.

I work where engineering rigour meets regulated domains: lending compliance, applied ML, and AI-accelerated workflow automation.

Selected experience

Founder & Owner · Uparity

Dec 2021 — Present London · Remote

Founded and solo-built Uparity Hub end-to-end — an AI-driven, multi-tenant loan origination platform that automates underwriting for 43 Habitat for Humanity affiliates plus a paying partner. It has processed 1,000+ loan applications for 800+ users, with regulatory compliance (ECOA / FCRA) engineered into the core.

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Supabase / Postgres (RLS)
  • Stripe Connect
  • Agentic AI
  • Vercel CI/CD

Software & Data Science Lead · Airex Technologies

Mar 2023 — Dec 2024 London · Hybrid

Led a cross-disciplinary team to ship a new ML-driven SaaS product on Airex’s smart-airbrick hardware, surfacing building "void health" to property managers — pairing an end-to-end supervised-learning model of mould and wood-decay risk with the production dashboard that delivered it.

  • Python
  • FastAPI / Django
  • React / Next.js
  • MQTT / IoT
  • scikit-learn
  • AWS

Doctoral & Postdoctoral Researcher · UCL · University of Pennsylvania

2018 — 2023 London · Philadelphia

PhD (UCL) and NIH-funded postdoc (UPenn) on the neural basis of human navigation — building full-stack research software that reached ~1,000 users and computational/ML models (Bayesian inference, reinforcement-learning agents) used to predict behaviour and de-risk experiments before data collection.

  • Python
  • C#
  • Unity3D / WebGL
  • fMRI analysis
  • HPC

Skills

Engineering & platform

  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • C#
  • SQL / PL/pgSQL
  • Node.js
  • React
  • Next.js
  • React Native / Expo
  • Tailwind CSS
  • TanStack Query
  • Zustand / Redux
  • Web accessibility (a11y)
  • Storybook
  • Nx (monorepo)
  • Express
  • NestJS
  • FastAPI
  • Django / Django Ninja
  • Pydantic
  • REST / OpenAPI
  • GraphQL
  • gRPC
  • WebSockets
  • Webhooks
  • Async / task queues (Celery, asyncio)
  • Supabase / Edge Functions / Vault
  • Auth: JWT, sessions, RBAC, 2FA/MFA
  • PostgreSQL (incl. RLS)
  • Prisma
  • Drizzle
  • SQLAlchemy / Alembic
  • Redis
  • DynamoDB
  • MongoDB
  • TimescaleDB
  • Aurora
  • S3
  • Schema design & migrations
  • AWS
  • AWS Lambda
  • AWS ECS / Fargate
  • AWS EC2 / RDS
  • AWS SQS / SNS / EventBridge
  • AWS API Gateway
  • AWS Cognito
  • AWS SageMaker
  • AWS CloudWatch
  • Vercel
  • Docker / containerisation
  • Terraform
  • AWS CDK / CloudFormation
  • CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Bitbucket)
  • Sentry
  • Multi-tenant SaaS architecture
  • MQTT / IoT data pipelines
  • NB-IoT / cellular IoT
  • Vitest / Jest
  • Playwright (E2E)
  • pytest
  • pgTAP
  • React Testing Library

AI & ML

  • Agentic AI loops
  • LLM / RAG applications
  • Human-in-the-loop design
  • Supervised learning (time-series / IoT)
  • Reinforcement-learning agents
  • OpenAI Gym
  • Unity ML-Agents
  • Bayesian model inference
  • Statistical modelling
  • Model validation (cross-validation)
  • Digital-twin modelling
  • Physics-based / domain modelling
  • AutoML (auto-sklearn)
  • PyTorch / TensorFlow
  • scikit-learn
  • pandas / NumPy / SciPy
  • statsmodels
  • Weights & Biases
  • matplotlib / seaborn / plotly
  • Jupyter notebooks
  • A* / pathfinding
  • Numerical methods / ODE solvers
  • fMRI / DICOM pipelines

Leadership & domain

  • Engineering management
  • Cross-disciplinary team leadership
  • Hiring & succession planning
  • Mentoring & coaching
  • Product definition & roadmap
  • Risk & resource balancing
  • Cross-functional / technical strategy
  • Stakeholder communication
  • Agile delivery (AgilePM certified)
  • Inclusive leadership (RAEng)
  • Pricing strategy
  • Budgeting / P&L ownership
  • Conference & public speaking
  • Regulated lending (ECOA / FCRA)
  • DTI underwriting
  • Loan Origination System (LOS) design
  • Fintech / regulated financial products
  • GDPR / data protection
  • Payment & subscription billing (Stripe Connect)
  • CRM design & data modelling

Selected publications

2022

Entropy of city street networks linked to future spatial navigation ability

Nature · Co-author

2018

The complex nature of hippocampal-striatal interactions in spatial navigation

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience · First author

2025

Predicting real-world navigation performance from a virtual navigation task in older adults

PLOS ONE · First author

2022

Extending neural systems for navigation to hunting behavior

Current Opinion in Neurobiology · First author

2022

Neural and behavioral correlates of flexible navigation in complex space

PhD thesis, UCL · Sole author

Full publication list on Google Scholar ↗

Education

2018 — 2021

PhD Computational Neuroscience

University College London

Thesis: Neural and behavioral correlates of flexible navigation in complex space

2018 — 2019

MSc Neuroscience

University College London
2014 — 2018

BS Psychology & Communication / Media Studies (dual major)

Georgia Institute of Technology

Minor in Business Finance — Scheller College of Business