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

  • Engineered custom web applications and sites for a diverse client portfolio, utilizing a modern technology stack including Next.js, Python, Django, Golang, and WordPress.
  • Built responsive, accessible, and user-friendly interfaces from design mockups, leveraging CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS, and extending WordPress with custom themes and plugins.
  • Partnered directly with project managers and clients to translate business objectives and complex requirements into actionable technical plans, user stories, and development sprints.
  • Implemented and maintained automated CI/CD pipelines to streamline deployment and testing processes across various hosting environments, including WPEngine and client-managed infrastructure.

Stuff I’ve Done

Career Break
  • Launched a full-stack trivia game (quizstreak.com) with Svelte/SvelteKit, diving deep into modern web development, game design, and statistics.
  • 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 small, agile engineering team in developing product growth features, working closely with Product, Sales, and Support to translate customer and business needs into technical solutions.
  • Architected and implemented a full-stack solution for complex, dynamic pricing models, building the backend logic in Python and the customer-facing configuration interface in React and TypeScript.
  • Supervised remote contractors in finalizing a company-wide Design System, establishing consistent design patterns and enforcing high code quality standards across the front-end codebase.
  • Improved core web vitals and user experience by analyzing browser bundle composition and optimizing dependencies, resulting an approximately 10% reduction in application build size.
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

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