About
I'm Justin Torre, an engineer and founder living in San Francisco. Today I'm Head of Enterprise Solutions at Mintlify, where we're building the context layer for AI agents. My job is to stand up a new team and take our enterprise product from zero to one.
I got here by way of Helicone, the open-source LLM observability company I started with Cole Gottdank in 2023. We went through Y Combinator in the W23 batch, processed more than 14 trillion tokens, grew past $1M in annual recurring revenue, and were acquired by Mintlify in March 2026. Before that I wrote Rust at Sisu, worked on CoreOS at Apple, and spent my college years rotating through co-ops in embedded systems and low-level software. I like working close to the machine and close to the customer, and the two have more in common than people expect.
Career
Education
Northeastern University
While I was there, I was a student developer at Sandbox, Northeastern's student-led software consultancy, and I tutored at the First Year Engineering Center. The internships and co-ops above at Intel, Lutron Electronics, and North Atlantic Industries all came through Northeastern's co-op program, which is most of the reason I picked the school. Alternating semesters of classes with semesters of full-time engineering work taught me more about shipping software than any course did.
Lessons
Things I learned building Helicone, from the note I wrote when we were acquired.
- A 5-person team can do an absurd amount if everyone is locked in. Headcount is not a moat.
- If you have data at scale and need analytics, just pick ClickHouse. Don't overthink it.
- The grind is real and it's fun, but try not to be stressed when you aren't grinding. That one took me too long to learn.
- It's never too late to pivot and try new things.
- Charge more for your product.