Staff+ Software Engineer — Platform, Data, & Reliability
Former Shopify L7 with 20+ years designing, building, stabilizing, and scaling business-critical platform, experimentation, and data systems across SaaS and fintech. Specializes in de-risking high-impact transitions through typed, observable architectures and hands-on incident leadership.
Staff+/Principal IC trusted with long-lived ownership of high-risk systems at startups, during code-reds, regulatory transitions, relaunches, and post-acquisition merges.
Location: British Columbia, Canada - Remote (Canada & US). Work authorization: Canada-based, open to US payroll or contract.
Professional Summary
Technical Leadership & Scope
- Staff+/Principal technical lead spanning platform, data, reliability, and product-adjacent systems, aligning teams around clear ownership boundaries and system invariants.
- Led high-risk migrations and redesigns under live traffic and regulatory constraints, balancing delivery pressure with long-term system integrity.
- Mentored 10 engineers to promotion (junior→senior); unblocked teams through architectural clarity, incident command, and deep debugging.
- Partnered directly with product, data, design, and compliance to translate business risk into concrete technical decisions.
Distributed Systems & Reliability
- Designed event-driven architectures and typed service boundaries to decouple high-throughput systems.
- Modernized caching/search layers (Redis, Elasticsearch, and vector search) to improve latency, correctness, and failure isolation.
- Introduced multi-region failover and disaster-recovery / business-continuity patterns for core services, reducing blast radius and improving recovery confidence under regional failure scenarios.
Platform Modernization
- Led post-acquisition platform unification; defined system ownership boundaries and data contracts while stabilizing Redshift/dbt pipelines and consolidating AWS/GCP; preventing data divergence and repeat incidents during backfills.
- Re-architected observability strategy, consolidating fragmented telemetry and eliminating unused tooling; improved incident signal-to-noise ratio.
- Increased developer velocity by introducing typed, contract-driven transformation pipelines for fintech integrations—eliminating schema drift, reducing regressions, and enabling safer parallel partner onboarding under regulatory constraints.
Experimentation, Analytics & AI
- Led Shopify's experimentation platform, restoring trust in experiment validity through invariant-driven workflows and explicit state machines—unlocking significantly higher experiment throughput with lower incident load.
- Designed and shipped production embedding-based retrieval and vector search systems, including relevance tuning for search, recommendation, and analytics.
- Architected low-latency analytics services powering internal and partner dashboards.
Experience
TheMuse / FairyGodBoss • Principal Engineer • 2024, 2025–Present
- Led code-red response for failing job ingestion pipeline: diagnosed cascade failure across Kafka and Elasticsearch, built custom debugging tools to trace jobs through the system, reverse-engineered undocumented AWS architecture, and coordinated fix—retained major clients.
- Established data-ownership boundaries and consistency contracts during post-acquisition stabilization; initiated Redshift/dbt/Looker governance work across 14 data sources and 152 dbt models.
- Audited production telemetry and observability posture; identified unused alerts and dead services for decommissioning.
Alloy • Staff Engineer • 2024–2025
- Led TypeScript migration and codebase modernization for partner integrations—fixed type definitions across all integrations and decomposed 2000+ line base classes into composable domains, removing the technical bottleneck that had limited onboarding to 2-3 integrations per year. Team now ships 2-3 per month.
- Onboarded and mentored offshore team; established patterns for MTLS, encryption, retry logic, and compliance workflows.
- Strengthened observability and reliability for regulated KYC/KYB integrations; partnered with security on data encryption and audit requirements.
Convene • Staff Engineer • 2024–2025
- Defined target architecture for a PayloadCMS / tRPC / AWS platform, aligning product and infra around clear ownership boundaries.
- Modernized CI/CD and production pipelines, improving resiliency, reducing latency, and increasing developer velocity through better observability and safer deploys.
- Architected in-house availability service to migrate away from Salesforce-based workflows.
GoFundMe • Staff Engineer • 2023–2024
- Delivered rapid integration for Classy acquisition: CSV-based data sync shipped in 1 week vs. months-long API integration proposal.
- Led technical discovery for analytics platform; evaluated visualization tools (QuickSight, Cube.js) and architected prototype—research informed subsequent platform direction.
- Mentored 3 engineers to promotion; established clean code and typing standards adopted across the org.
Shopify • Staff (L7) Software Engineer • 2021–2023
- Owned Shopify's experimentation platform end-to-end; decoupled feature rollouts from experiments so teams could ship without data science overhead. Increased experiment volume ~80% and adoption ~3×; optimized for cart page with no measurable impact to TTFB, LCP, or INP at p95.
- Identified experiment-quality failures rooted in UX and missing invariants; redesigned as an explicit state machine with enforced lifecycle transitions—reduced support tickets despite 80% volume increase; on-call dropped from full-time to daily check-ins.
- Led Staff-level initiatives across backend, frontend, DX, and reliability; mentored 7 engineers to promotion; integrated GPT for experiment hypothesis validation and inline implementation guidance.
- Recognized with 16 internal awards for sustained cross-org platform impact.
GoFundMe • Staff Engineer • 2020–2021
- Promoted to technical team lead of the Templating Platform pod; shipped a major seasonal launch with stronger type safety and explicit workflows that reduced integration risk.
- Built campaign template editor now used by most nonprofits—multi-level hierarchy (org → chapter → campaign) with brand controls; rock-solid in production, zero dedicated team needed since 2021.
- Championed devspace adoption for local Kubernetes development, improving developer onboarding across teams.
Earlier Career
Built and operated long-lived systems end-to-end, establishing the foundation later applied at Shopify, GoFundMe, and fintech platforms.
- Zept • Founding Engineer (2017–2020): Built core web and mobile platforms; introduced early embedding-based matching and event-driven shared architecture.
- Mailout • Senior Engineer (2009–2017, acquired): Found a problem nobody assigned. The email editor was barely functional—two text areas, huge engineering effort per template. Skunkworked a replacement with a custom markup language. Non-technical users could suddenly build sophisticated emails. Drove the ARR that made the company acquisition-attractive.
- WedImage • Technical Founder (2010–2020): Built the whole thing from scratch—Rails, React, Stripe, Elasticsearch. Implemented image similarity search before off-the-shelf ML tooling existed. Profitable and self-sustaining for a decade.
Education and Certifications
- B.A., ICS (2005)
- Google Professional Cloud Architect (2024)
- Triplebyte Certified Full Stack Engineer (2017)
Technical Skills
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Terraform, VPC/networking, container orchestration, Docker, Kubernetes, ECS/Fargate, observability (Datadog), cloud cost optimization, SaaS multi-tenant architecture.
Data & Analytics: Snowflake, Redshift, dbt, Looker, Luigi, Snowplow, metrics pipelines, Experimentation Platform architecture, analytics microservices.
Search, AI & Retrieval: LLMs, LLM-powered search and retrieval, embedding-based search, vector databases, embeddings, knowledge-graph–influenced recommendation, RAG, relevance/scoring systems.
Application Architecture: TypeScript, Node.js/NestJS, React, GraphQL, API design, event-driven systems, scalable microservices, SDK strategy.
Developer Platforms & DX: CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Internal Developer Platform (IDP) patterns, governance, typing/tooling, developer-experience modernization, reliability engineering.
Fintech, Risk & Compliance: Risk & Compliance / KYC/KYB decisioning, integrations (LSEG/Middesk/Orbis), data-quality workflows, platform governance.