Justin Piñero
Founder · Principal Engineer
- 7 years FDNY paramedic → 4+ years shipping production software
- Meta FAIR (LIGHT), ReSim, Dirac
- Builds Claude-powered products and tooling with the Anthropic API and Claude Code
- Test discipline at volume: 1,257+, 798, 726+ tests across projects
- Two npm packages published; Arctic Code Vault contributor
Justin Piñero was born and raised in the Bronx, which is part of why the studio's mascot is a coquí, the little Puerto Rican tree frog whose voice carries far bigger than its size. Before he wrote software, he spent seven years as an FDNY paramedic (2010–2017), making triage calls under time pressure with incomplete information. That's where he learned to stay calm, decide fast, and tell people the truth plainly. They're the same things that make him good to work with now.
Over the past several years he's shipped production systems people actually use. At Meta's FAIR lab he was the primary frontend engineer on LIGHT, a research project where humans and AI-driven characters share the same live world. He built simulation tooling for autonomous vehicles at ReSim, and at Dirac he worked full-stack on manufacturing and simulation software, leading a migration from GraphQL to Go gRPC that boosted performance, building interactive 3D CAD renderings, and shipping the API that became the product's second-most-used feature.
Coquí Labs is his studio: a deliberately small shop that gives small and mid-sized businesses the kind of senior engineering usually reserved for companies that can afford a whole team. The approach is test-driven, direct, and allergic to hand-waving. His motto on GitHub is just "Just Build," which about covers it. When he's not shipping, he's probably gaming, doing voice work, or being supervised by Iggy, his dog and least-productive-but-most-beloved colleague.