Elijah Silverman

I build software people use every day, and I read bond markets for a living. Two years engineering the internal tools behind Lazard's investment teams, now an analyst on its Global Fixed Income desk. Nights and weekends, I ship things like the ones below.

Portfolio Analyst, Global Fixed Income
Lazard Asset Management, New York

Things I've built

Double Down

Wager on every answer. Double down when you know it.

Three questions against three bots. Runs entirely in your browser.

Double Down Trivia

Real-time trivia where every answer is a bet.

Up to eight friends join a private room with a five-letter code, type their answers, and wager 1 to 10 points on each one. Right answers win the wager, wrong ones lose it, and the board remembers who called it. Play a sample round right here.

  • Taps feel instant. useOptimistic and transitions show your wager and answer the moment you lock in, while the server confirms in the background.
  • Scores never race. Cloud Functions settle each round inside a Firestore transaction, so eight players locking in the same second still add up.
  • Typos still count. Levenshtein matching allows one typo on short answers and two on long ones, but numbers must be exact. Misses can get a second look from an AI grader, and the host can overrule either.
  • Games survive bad Wi-Fi. Dropped writes retry with exponential backoff, and the round reveals on its own if a phone goes quiet.

Built with Next.js, React 19, TypeScript, Firestore, Cloud Functions

Snail Mail's tracking map: a letter's route from Portland, Maine to Lisbon, carried by a snail
Snail Mail on a phone: 'Mail that takes its sweet time.'

Snail Mail

Letters that take their sweet time.

Write a letter, hand it to one of six carriers, from a pigeon to a message in a bottle to a snail, and pick exactly how long it travels: an hour, or a year. The words stay sealed until it lands, and you can follow every mile of the trip on the map.

  • Delivery that can wait a year. Each letter is its own durable Vercel Workflow run that sleeps until arrival, then delivers and notifies. A daily sweep catches anything that slips.
  • Maps drawn on the server. Routes are plotted with d3-geo over Natural Earth data and served as cacheable SVG layers, painted with CSS masks so the map follows the light or dark theme.
  • Write it by hand, or have it written. Upload photos of a real handwritten letter, or have an image model trace your typed one onto airmail, kraft or cream stationery.
  • Safe for strangers. Bot checks, rate limits, blocking, reporting and an 18+ pen-pal directory, in five languages.

Built with Next.js, Vercel Workflow, Postgres, Drizzle, AI SDK

MoDate's matching screen: a candidate's profile in the middle and scored potential matches on the right
MOSwipe list mode on a phone: ranked matches with scores and Propose buttons
MOSwipe card mode on a phone: one suggested match with dismiss, skip and propose buttons
Screenshots use demo data. Every profile shown is made up.

MoDate

Volunteer matchmaking, with real tools for the matchmakers.

MoDate Offline is free matchmaking for the Modern Orthodox community. Singles fill out a three-minute profile, a volunteer connector gets to know them, and introductions arrive over WhatsApp. No app and no swiping for the singles. The swiping happens on the other side, in the workspace the connectors use.

  • A match engine both apps agree on. Pairs are scored on age range, religious level, Kohen rules, location and aliyah plans. The rules are tunable by admins and ported to Swift so web and iPhone rank the same way.
  • MOSwipe for matchmakers. Swipe right to propose, left to dismiss, or switch to a ranked list, on the web or in the native SwiftUI app.
  • Live, and fine offline. Firestore listeners keep every connector's view current, with an offline cache shared across tabs.
  • Keeps volunteers moving. Transactional claims and handoffs, reminders by push, email and WhatsApp, AI screening of new signups, and a monthly points leaderboard.

Built with React 19, Vite, Firestore, Cloud Functions, SwiftUI

Earlier, 2021 to 2022

Treadlite's landing page: a footprint pressed into dark soil

Treadlite

Plan the trip, then shrink its footprint.

A travel planner that helps people cut carbon without cutting the trip short.

Built with React Native, Express, MongoDB

Stuck in Space

A browser arcade game with a terminal soul.

Dodge debris, find the way out of orbit, and post your run to a global leaderboard.

Built with JavaScript, React, Ruby

Code, then markets

I came to engineering from business school and consulting, spent two years writing the tools a trading floor runs on, then crossed the desk to use them. Knowing both sides is the point: I can talk to the people who need the software and then go build it.

  1. tonow

    Portfolio Analyst, Global Fixed Income

    Lazard Asset Management, New York

    Sovereign and supranational debt across many markets. I sit between the portfolio managers and the systems they depend on, so the numbers on screen are the numbers that are true.

  2. to

    Full Stack Software Engineer

    Lazard Asset Management, New York

    Built and scaled the in-house apps 200+ analysts and portfolio managers open every morning. Led the Angular and Node rebuild of legacy financial tools and wrote the AG Grid data views they live in.

  3. to

    Business Strategy Consultant

    YYA Consulting & Management, Tel Aviv

    Wrote proposals alongside a Big Four firm, designed deliverables for teams of seven-plus specialists, and ran onboarding for new hires.

Studied

  • Reichman University (IDC Herzliya)
    BA, Business Administration and Entrepreneurship. 4.0 GPA, magna cum laude.
  • Flatiron School
    Full-stack web development: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, React.

Tools I reach for

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Angular
  • Node.js
  • Python
  • SQL
  • Firebase
  • Postgres
  • AWS
  • Bloomberg Terminal

Away from a screen

  • Black belt, Shotokan karate
  • PADI open water diver
  • Red Cross advanced first aid

Contact

Email is the best way to reach me.