Justin Smestad

About Justin Smestad

I build engineering teams that ship reliably without burning out. More than a decade of remote engineering leadership across 8 companies, from seed stage to Shopify-scale. I\'ve taken multiple companies from pre-seed investment through acquisition, building the engineering teams and culture along the way. At Shopify, I\'ve rotated across 8 teams in Growth, brought in to raise the bar on technical direction, architecture, and engineering culture. Highlights include leading Shopify\'s first pricing change in company history, architecting the entitlements system that powers authorization for all customers and contracts, and transforming Customer Support systems with an AI-first architecture. Before Shopify, I co-authored Warden, the Ruby authentication library with 125M+ downloads that powers Devise. I founded the Application Security and Developer Tools teams at Red Canary, built compliance systems for FDA approval at Enzyme (YCombinator), and bootstrapped Mongo Machine to profitability as a solo founder before it was acquired by Compose (later IBM).I write about engineering leadership, team process, and what changes when AI makes code cheap at evalcode.com.

Experience

1. Senior Staff Engineer

   Shopify

   May 2022 — Present

   Rotated across 8 teams in Growth, brought in to raise the bar on technical direction, architecture, and engineering culture. Balance long-term platform investments against short-term product needs to capture market opportunities.• Led Shopify\'s first pricing change in company history, driving millions in additional revenue by coordinating across engineering, product, and business teams to ship without disruption.• Architected an entitlements system that now powers authorization for all Shopify customers and their contracts, eliminating thousands of developer hours of manual authorization logic.• Redesigned the billing system to operate across global markets.• Transformed Customer Support systems with an AI-first architecture.• Elevated engineering quality and delivery pace in every team through hands-on mentorship and process change that stuck after moving on.

Education

• University of Iowa

  B.S., Computer Science

  2004 — 2008

Skills

• Startup Marketing
• Devops
• System Architecture
• Chef
• Early-Stage Startups
• Test Driven Development
• Bootstrapping
• Continuous Integration
• Lean Startup
• Coffeescript
• Tdd
• User Acceptance Testing
• Ruby on Rails
• Software Development
• Nosql
• User Experience
• Web Services
• Startup Development
• Sql
• User Interface Design
• Jquery
• Web Applications
• Rspec
• Javascript
• Ember.js
• Puppet
• Photoshop
• Mongodb
• Ruby
• Cloud Computing
• Git
• Integration Testing