Applied AI · Financial infrastructure

Austin Dase

I build software at the intersection of applied AI and financial infrastructure. I'm Director of Engineering at Fundrise, where I lead the engineering behind our AI-enabled products — including RealAI — and still contribute daily. I've been here since 2019, working with the team to build a better financial system for the individual.

Most of my work has been zero-to-one: taking a concept through prototype to a production system people depend on. RealAI is the current one; before it, Equitize, a private-securities platform providing secondary market liquidity. Underneath both is a decade of experience in payments, KYC, and settlement infrastructure in highly regulated domains.

10 yrs in softwareM.S. Computer Science, Towson ’19Washington, DC / Maryland

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Selected work

Product · 0→1

RealAI

Fundrise's flagship AI product, taken from early prototype through public launch and still under active development; built on Next.js, TypeScript, and Vercel. An agent harness with MCP servers, prompt and context architecture, and a suite of tools for LLMs to produce high-quality real estate analysis.

Product · 0→1

Equitize

Fundrise's private secondary-market securities platform, shipped from concept to launch and scaled to millions in transaction volume. Concept, prototype, architecture, and implementation — then operating the platform.

Infrastructure

Payments, KYC, and settlement at Fundrise

The systems underneath the platform: an ACH processing architecture handling $1B+ in annual transaction volume, a Stripe debit funding integration that processed 40k+ transactions in its first year, automated KYC for every user, and automated transfer-agent reconciliation replacing a manual process.

Open source

Spring AI — Anthropic integration

Two contributions merged into Spring AI's Anthropic support: tool_choice controls for Claude function calling, and per-message TTL plus configurable cache-block usage for prompt caching, shipped in 1.1.0-M2.