the queen · reach in every direction
Six years at Shopify.
Platforms other engineers depend on. Three teams, three moves.
three moves
By shape, not by numbers.
The figures live on a résumé. This is the kind of problem each team had, and what it taught.
- 1.2020
Online Store and Themes
Git-based workflows for themes, and the first version of the GitHub integration that let merchants' developers treat a theme like code. The year I learned how a platform with millions of tenants rolls anything out.
- 2.2022
Oxygen and Custom Storefronts
Hosting for React storefronts at the edge. I championed the re-architecture into decoupled, event-driven services and a staged rollout that moved every merchant without a regression; co-built a system that replays production traffic against every pull request; led trace exports into merchants' own observability tools; merged two Cloudflare zones into one. The shape of it: make a hosting platform safe to change.
- 3.2025
Platform Infrastructure, Job Platform
The datastore under every background job, moved from one system to a replicated cross-region one. I built the failover and failback path and drove the first live cross-region transfer; designed and built the configuration service that keeps clusters correct across restarts; built the guards against split-brain and unsafe evictions on Kubernetes; led root-cause analyses and shipped safer incident controls; made every job test run against both datastores in CI. The shape of it: change the ground under a system while it is running.
what the moves have in common
The through line.
Every team was a platform, which means the users were other engineers and the failure modes were theirs before they were mine. The work that mattered most was never the feature. It was the rollout plan, the test that ran against production traffic, the failover path that had been exercised before it was needed, and the write-up afterwards.
Languages and tools along the way: Ruby, Go, TypeScript, Python and Lua; Kubernetes, Terraform, Cloudflare Workers; Tarantool, Redis, MySQL, Kafka; OpenTelemetry and the usual on-call.
alongside
Coraki.
Since 2023, a studio with Cory Crowley: applied AI, engineered to last, for funded startups and enterprises. memo and Ravine are made there. The knight's page has the rest.