Shawn “Wookiee” Parker

Tech Lead / Staff Engineer with 20+ years of experience

Castle Pines, CO
80108, USA

Tech lead / staff engineer with 20+ years turning fuzzy product asks into dependable systems, across startups, scale-ups, and client shops. I’ve taken apart monoliths more than once, built the services that replace them, and carried the pager through the transition. I’ve led projects from concept to launch, improved system reliability, and mentored engineers. I move slow and fix things.

Stuff I’m Doing

Wander.com,  Austin, TX(Remote)

Team Lead / Software Engineer IV

Dec 2025 – present

  • Lead extraction of the Property domain from the monolith into a dedicated system of record, deliberately keeping search and business logic out; serving teams including booking, payments, search, and front end.
  • Run the migration with zero downtime: dual writes, a reconciler comparing both systems around the clock, and authoritative reads cut over field by field. Issues have been limited to data consistency, resolved without large-scale recovery.
  • Shipped a leaner listing API on the new system of record: payloads down ~80%, cached guest API median latency down 47%, uncached host-site p99 down 57% in benchmarks, with the migration’s shadow-merge hop still in the request path.
  • Own production reliability during the parallel run: incident response, latency diagnosis, and repair of inconsistencies, including uncovering undocumented legacy behavior and encoding it as explicit contracts.

Stuff I’ve Done

Culture Foundry,  Seattle, WA(Remote)

Software Engineer, Contractor

Mar 2024 – Dec 2025

  • Built custom web applications and sites for clients across industries, working in Next.js, Python, Django, Golang, and WordPress.
  • Built responsive, accessible interfaces from design mockups in Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS, and extended WordPress with custom themes and plugins.
  • Partnered with project managers and clients to turn requirements into scoped technical plans and deliverables.
  • Implemented CI/CD pipelines for deployment and testing across WPEngine and client-managed hosting.
Career Break
  • Launched a trivia game (quizstreak.com) on SvelteKit and Supabase, covering modern web development, game design, and statistics.
  • Learned Kubernetes by building local clusters from scratch — how they work, not just how to use them.
  • Stepped away after 11 years in startups to recharge and retool before returning to full-time work.
RevOps,  Berkeley, CA(Remote)

Lead Software Engineer

Apr 2022 – Mar 2023

  • Led a small engineering team building product growth features, coordinating with Product, Sales, and Support on what to build and why.
  • 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 in an approximately 10% reduction in application build size.
Twilio,  San Francisco, CA

Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead, Growth Engineering

Jul 2019 – Jan 2022

  • Designed fault-tolerant systems that supported multiple teams in onboarding new members and accelerating product adoption.
  • 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

  • Worked across four product teams: Growth Engineering, Experimentation Platform, Phone Numbers, and Console.
  • Built a custom-built customer data platform, integrated into the experimentation platform, that let teams make run-time decisions about their customers based on live data and computed metrics.
  • Brought the company into compliance with international phone number regulations via a patented workflow that provisions numbers against country-specific rules.
  • Deconstructed a monolithic PHP codebase so individual teams could own their development lifecycles, reduce contention over core sections, and grow their own back-end services.
  • 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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