Shawn “Wookiee” Parker
Tech Lead / Staff Engineer with more than 20 years of experience
Castle Pines, CO
80108, USA
Senior Software Engineer and tech lead with 11+ years of experience building and scaling full-stack web applications in startup environments. Specializing in TypeScript, React, and Node.js, with a proven track record of leading projects from concept to launch, improving system reliability, and mentoring engineers. Passionate about moving slow and fixing things.
Stuff I’m Doing
- Culture Foundry, Seattle, WA(Remote)
Software Engineer, Contractor
Mar 2024 – present
- Develop custom web application supporting thousands of daily users using Next.js & Golang.
- Develop custom WordPress sites using Bootstrap and Tailwind, enhancing functionality through custom code and with plugins like Advanced Custom Fields.
- Collaborate with clients to break down requirements and plan development work, focusing on mobile responsiveness and accessibility.
- Automate workflows for CI/CD pipelines across WPEngine and customer hosted environments.
Stuff I’ve Done
- Career Break
-
- Launched a full-stack trivia game (quizstreak.com) with Svelte/SvelteKit, diving deep into modern web development to see what the hype was about.
- Got hands-on with Kubernetes by building local clusters from scratch, moving beyond just using them to truly understanding how they work under the hood.
- Took a break after 11 years in the startup grind to recharge, retool, and return to work with fresh energy and new perspectives.
- RevOpos, Inc, Berkeley, CA(Remote)
Lead Software Engineer
Apr 2022 – Mar 2023
- Led a team focused on customer and product growth to implement new features in Python and React/TypeScript, working closely with Product, Sales, and Support teams to meet customer and product needs.
- Enabled customers to create complex dynamic pricing models based on custom properties attached to product SKUs.
- Supervised remote contractors in finalizing an internal Design System, ensuring consistent code quality and design patterns.
- Improved application performance by reducing build size through browser analysis and package optimization.
- Twilio, San Francisco, CA
Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead, Growth Engineering
Jul 2019 – Jan 2022
- Developed scalable, fault-tolerant systems that supported multiple teams in onboarding new members and accelerating product adoption through innovative application designs and effective cross-team collaboration.
- Mentored engineers on project and task management, engineering best practices, problem-solving, and code quality.
- Oversaw remote contractors and streamlined team productivity by clarifying expectations and task definitions.
Senior Software Engineer 1 & 2
Jun 2011 – Jul 2019
- Contributed to various teams, including Growth Engineering, Experimentation Platform, Phone Numbers, and Console.
- Enabled teams to make run-time decisions about their customers based on live data and computed metrics through a custom built customer data platform integrated in to the experimentation platform.
- Enabled company compliance with international phone number regulations though a patented workflow system to provision phone numbers in compliance with worldwide, country specific rules.
- Enabled individual teams to support their own development lifecycles, decrease contention over core sections of the codebase, and to adopt and grow their back-end services per their own needs by deconstructing a monolithic PHP code base.
- Drove a culture of testing as a normal part of the development lifecycle Increased adoption of technologies and tooling to improve system observability and drive down recovery time from errors.
Patents
U.S. Patent 11,153,390 B2 - Multi-Jurisdictional Endpoint Allocation Compliance
A system for evaluating and verifying jurisdictional eligibility to allocate resources based on identification data and regulatory rule sets.
Where I Learned
- Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts
University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, Colorado