Melvin Gruesbeck

operator · designer · storyteller · wayfinder

I bring a blend of operations, design, engineering, and communications experience, built exclusively alongside research teams at the seed, hyper-growth, and Fortune 100 stages.

Most recently at Profluent Bio, I built the business infrastructure bridging finance, legal, HR, IT, compliance, and communications, and optimized them as we scaled to eliminate bottlenecks before they compounded. By developing this connective tissue, I helped transform a one-room operation into a mature startup capable of raising nine-figure funding and signing billion-dollar partnerships in a highly regulated industry.

Next, I want to bring AI agents to operations, design, and communications.

On weekends I backcountry ski, mountaineer, rock climb, ride motorcycles, and fix things with power tools.

1Pack2Skis3Helmet4Gloves5Boots6Poles

photo: Brendan King

{
  "pack": "Mammut ski pack, lean supply chain. Partners handle catering.",
  "skis": "Fischer Transalp 82 Carbonlite, currently an expensive backpack accessory.",
  "helmet": "Petzl Meteor, protecting the operation's most valuable asset.",
  "gloves": "Black leather gloves, four-wheel-drive mode engaged.",
  "boots": "Fischer Travers CS, built for skiing, used for climbing.",
  "poles": "Ski poles, tossed down. Gravity handles logistics."
}

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• Head of CommunicationsProfluent · Emeryville, CA2025 – 2026

  Managed the company brand and its milestone announcements. Reported directly to Ali Madani, Founder & CEO, and discussed communications strategy with the board.

  ├──Corporate communications Managed announcements for major funding, scientific breakthroughs in generative protein design, and partnership milestones with Revvity, IDT, Corteva, and RSRT.

  ├──Communications infrastructure Deployed the comms stack (Business Wire, Figma, Ghost, Octolens, Typefully, YouTube, Webflow) to streamline website development, visual design, media publishing, brand monitoring, and press release distribution.

  └──Multimedia production Partnered with art studios and niche artists to produce foundational corporate assets, including the ProGen3 launch video and social media campaigns like the E1 launch.

• Head of OperationsProfluent · Berkeley, CA2022 – 2025

  First FTE to Ali Madani, then solo Founder & CEO. Scaled to 50+ employees and $150M in total funding. Backed by Altimeter Capital, Air Street Capital, AIX Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Convergent Ventures, Insight Partners, and Spark Capital.

  ├──Corporate development Designed narrative and decks with the CEO for the Series A ($35M) and Series B ($106M). Coordinated due diligence for both rounds and the Eli Lilly partnership ($2.25B), in partnership with the executive team, internal stakeholders, and external counsel (Ropes & Gray LLP).

  ├──Finance Hired and oversaw external finance partners to manage an eight-figure annual operating budget, ensuring operational efficiency and compliance across AP, AR, corporate tax, FP&A, GAAP audits, and R&D tax credits.

  ├──Real estate & facilities Led the execution of two commercial real estate deals. Correctly predicted a local market downturn, saving the company mid-seven figures on a single transaction and positioning it for multi-million-dollar savings in long-term lease liabilities. Presented real estate strategy directly to the board. Delegated logistics to secure a successful facility move-in and operation.

  ├──IT & security Led selection, setup, and integration of foundational software across HR, finance, legal, communications, IT, facilities, and recruiting. Established a security posture of centralized password management, MDM, MFA, SSO, and RBAC that led to SOC 2 Type 1 certification. Directed MSPs to deploy a secure physical network for compute-heavy AI infrastructure and mixed-use wet-lab R&D, and served as System Super Admin across critical business platforms.

  └──Human resources Managed payroll, compliance, benefits, business insurance, process automation, and visa sponsorships. Established foundational roles such as Principal Designer, Laboratory and Operations Manager, Executive Director of Operations, and Principal Security & Infrastructure Engineer.

• Design EngineerSalesforce · Palo Alto, CA2016 – 2021

  Founding member of the Salesforce AI Research team, which grew from tens to hundreds. Collaborated daily with research leads on NLP, CV, and RL projects, fostered a design culture within the unit, and contributed dozens of innovation projects a year. Reported to Kedar Doshi, SVP of Engineering, Einstein.ai.

  ├──Design education Taught a curriculum and created a design kit to help researchers make compelling figures. Held design office hours and made over 50 technical diagrams and 2D animations for papers and blog posts in Nature, ACL, ICLR, and NeurIPS.

  ├──AI Economist Designed a game interface for a virtual economy that captured data from human players. Visualized implementation details and led the 3D video animation. Published in Science Advances; featured in MIT Tech Review, the Financial Times, and more.

  ├──Einstein Voice Co-created the early prototype that evolved into Salesforce’s voice assistant. Version one used named entity recognition and intent classification to trigger Salesforce APIs, authenticate, and perform basic CRUD, and spun off projects in search, service, and sales.

  ├──Salesforce Research website Planned, designed, built, and maintained the team website. Aligned leaders through workshops, created written and graphical content, and programmed it with NodeJS, Express, npm scripts, LESS, Docker, Jenkins, AWS, and Ghost CMS. Worked with security, legal, and marketing on enterprise compliance, and held 99.9% uptime through global traffic spikes after major press releases.

  └──Documentation Designed the initial computer vision and NLP documentation. Applied Pew Research standards to survey API users and distilled the findings for the team.

• Founding Design EngineerMetaMind · Palo Alto, CA2015 – 2016

  First technical design hire at a computer vision and NLP deep learning startup funded by Khosla Ventures. Owned product design and marketing design and reported to Ruslan Belkin, VP of Engineering. Acquired by Salesforce for $32.8 million.

• Design, Marketing & PhotographyEarly Career · Napa Valley, CA2009 – 2015

  Apprenticed under architectural photographer Adrian Gregorutti, with work published in The New York Times, Vogue, and Architectural Digest. As marketing assistant at ZD Wines, designed and built the inaugural Amgen Tour of California partnership website. Founded a design agency with municipal and institutional clients before discovering an interest in AI and moving to Silicon Valley.

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• The AI Economist: Improving Equality and Productivity with AI-Driven Tax PoliciesFigure & Interface DesignScience Advances
• Deep learning-enabled breast cancer hormonal receptor status determination from base-level H&E stainsFigure DesignNature Magazine
• Learning to Retrieve Reasoning Paths over Wikipedia Graph for Question AnsweringFigure DesignICLR
• PHOTON: A Robust Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL SystemFigure DesignACL
• SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in ContextFigure DesignACL
• Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse familiesFigure DesignNature Biotechnology
• XLDA: Cross-Lingual Data Augmentation for Natural Language Inference and Question AnsweringFigure DesignPreprint
• Explain Yourself! Leveraging Language Models for Commonsense ReasoningFigure DesignPreprint

• Design ConsultantUniversity of California, San Franciscovolunteer
• Public Affairs (ADSO-PA)US Coast Guard Auxiliaryvolunteer
• AIARE 1American Institute for Avalanche Research & Educationcert
• FORM+FUND FellowshipUniversity of California, Berkeleycert
• Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting ProgramUS Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)cert
• Open Water / Advanced Open Water / Rescue DiverProfessional Association of Diving Instructorscert
• M1California Department of Motor Vehiclescert
• P1 / P2US Hang Gliding & Paragliding Associationcert
• Traditional Hunter EducationCalifornia Department of Fish and Wildlifecert

• Journalism & PRPacific Union CollegeBS
• PhotographyPacific Union CollegeAS
• ExtracurricularAstronomy tutor, student association officer, yearbook editor, campus newspaper photo editor, band leader

Ball Lightning, Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People, Billion Dollar Lessons, Death’s End, Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology, and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics, Good to Great, Leaving the Atocha Station, Math Without Numbers, Nudge, Principles, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Tao Te Ching, The Alchemy of Finance, The Ascent of Money, The Dark Forest, The Order of Time, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life, Understanding the US Government, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Zero to One.

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