Cory McDonald

• Second engineer at company. Owned architecture and delivery across web platform, native mobile app, and third-party integrations.
• Led implementation of new Shopify ecommerce and PoS experience, leading to $3 million in sales.
• Created first data ingestion pipelines for Ticketmaster and Shopify in Typescript
• Deployed better-auth to create user accounts, leading to 60K registered users in 4 months.
• Built a bracket system for fans to predict game outcomes leading to 16K brackets created, 8K new users registered, and 168K unique visitors.

• Following migration of BARK's subscription platform to Shopify, moved into sole IC ownership for Payments under the Architecture organization.

• Architected and implemented proxy serverless functions for 3rd party subscription service. Built a promotion system that allowed one-time additions on orders to be discounted. Led to increased AOV and customer spend.

• Led Implementation of internal Revenue Recognition System (ASC 606) in Rails to ensure accurate reporting of all recurring fulfillments.

  • Created a double-entry ledger system for transactions, discounts, and fulfillment using GCP PubSub with 5M+ events flowing throughout the month.

• Migrated 1M+ active subscriptions over course of one year from an internal Ruby on Rails subscription management system to the Shopify Subscription Platform.
• Architected a new subscription change workflow that allowed customers to change their subscription plans without going through customer support and easily seeing previous, new, and recurring charges.
• Focused on long term maintainability of the payments platform by contributing new prepaid and monthly subscription plan models. Simplified accounting close and decreased monthly support tickets by 10%.
• Led multi-quarter project to migrate fraud management software from Kount to Signifyd, increasing our authorization rate by 8 bps and decreasing our chargeback fees by $1.1M yearly.

• Contributed code, reviews and scaled the team from 1 to 8+ engineers with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• Championed early adoption of AI Tools (GitHub Copilot) across the engineering team, driving developer productivity through a self-reported 10% increase in throughput.
• Led Apple Pay and Venmo integration in Ruby on Rails / Vue as a payment option for recurring subscriptions, achieving 35% adoption across the new subscriber base.
• Launched variable shipping rates with support for A/B testing, optional expedited charges, free shipping promotions, and customer support appeasements.

• Fine-tuned payout process ensuring KYC status is shown to customers, and payout currency is reflected across multiple services.

• Created payout reports supporting 500K creators to show money movement from ledger service to customer wallets, reconciling transactions.

• Created endpoints using Rails API, Redis, and Fastly that are consumed daily by 6 million browsers averaging 1000 RPS.

• Coded and implemented a distributed, privacy-preserving e-commerce system.

  • Leveraged Golang to create RESTful endpoints for orders, transactions, and processing cryptocurrency funds. 

• Responsible for creating, testing, and code reviewing features in 8 separate Ruby on Rails applications.
• Gave multiple technical talks over React and TypeScript.
• Led weekly operations review and tracked historical application performance resulting in finding previously undetected code defects.
• Mentored over 5 new software engineers in the development academy and guided them through foundational programming concepts, best practices, software architecture, and professionalism.

• Hired as the first high-school technology intern in company history; progressed to operating as a part-time full-stack engineer shipping production features with minimal oversight. Won 2015 company hackathon using Ruby on Rails.

Ran a meetup called Ask a Dev which focused on early career mentoring and education. Membership grew to 6 average attendees over the course of 2 years.