Full-stack Engineer and Technical Leader

Cratejoy is a Y Combinator–backed subscription commerce platform. As the founding CTO and a hands-on engineer throughout, I owned every layer of the system for over a decade. Architected and scaled a multi-tenant platform supporting 3,000+ custom storefronts with 99.99% uptime over 10+ years, processing tens of thousands of daily transactions across multiple payment gateways. Built event-driven microservices architecture using Python, Kafka, and PostgreSQL; maintained full observability with custom monitoring, alerting, and runbooks. Designed and operated Kubernetes clusters on AWS, including custom Go controllers and mutators for production infrastructure automation — optimizing workload scheduling between on-demand and spot instances. Shipped a killer CI/CD pipeline enabling multiple production releases per day with zero-downtime deployments and automated rollback. Integrated platform with 20+ third-party services including Stripe, PayPal, ShipStation, Klaviyo, and major 3PL providers via REST APIs and webhooks. Interviewed 100+ subscription box sellers prior to building the platform; worked on-site with customers to translate business needs into technical solutions. Built and managed engineering and product teams; mentored engineers and established code review, branching, documentation, and security practices. Automated the platform to operational self-sufficiency before departing.

Led a team of 12 engineers as an active individual contributor on high-scale social gaming platforms supporting 2M+ concurrent users. Architected and launched the Bingo platform from the ground up; managed cross-functional delivery across Product, QA, and Analytics. Built Zynga’s first commercial HTML5 game client (Poker) to meet a platform launch deadline — prototyped in two weeks working with leading HTML5 experts.

Designed and optimized a distributed MySQL database processing 100M+ daily row insertions. Architected the analytics platform that became the #1 online poker statistics website. Implemented sophisticated caching and aggregation strategies to handle high query volumes.