Brian Williamson

Overview

13 years in software engineering, the last 2 at Shopify, where I lead the payments platform team. Brought on-call pages for payments platform down from 37 a week to 1. Led the migration of 32 services to Java. Before that: Ubisoft and OpenText. Most at home with Java and Kafka. Cyclist - trying to do a century this year.

Experience

1. Engineering Manager

   Dec 2024 - Present
   Shopify · 1 yr 10 mo · Full-time · Vancouver, BC
   • Mentored 5 engineers through their first promotion.
   • Took payment success rates from 94.8% to 96.6%.
2. Backend Engineer

   Apr 2022 - Dec 2024
   Ubisoft · 2 yr 8 mo · Full-time · Vancouver, BC
   • Moved 89% of payments platform traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
   • Shipped 15 launches on the payments platform team without a rollback.
3. Backend Engineer

   Aug 2019 - Apr 2022
   OpenText · 2 yr 8 mo · Full-time · Vancouver, BC
   • Moved 71% of payments platform traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
   • Shipped 19 launches on the payments platform team without a rollback.
4. Senior Backend Engineer

   Dec 2016 - Aug 2019
   Accenture · 2 yr 8 mo · Full-time · Vancouver, BC
   • Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 40 minutes to under 5.
5. Backend Engineer

   Jul 2015 - Dec 2016
   Canadian Tire · 1 yr 5 mo · Full-time · Vancouver, BC
   • Reduced cloud spend on payments platform by 39% in two quarters.
   • Designed the reconciliation system that matches 8 million transactions a day.

Projects

No references yet.

Education

1. Rotman School of Management

   MBA, Business Administration
   2015 - 2017
2. Concordia University

   BEng, Mathematics
   2009 - 2013