Matt Burnett

Senior / Staff Software Engineer

Nearly 15 years building full-stack products and high-scale systems. Former Shopify Senior Engineer with deep TypeScript, React, and Node.js experience, plus Go, SQL, GraphQL, Java, AWS, and GCP.

Portland, Oregon · Senior/Staff IC roles · Full-stack · Architecture · Developer Platforms

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What I Do

Full-stack product engineering

React and TypeScript on the frontend; Node.js, Go, Java, SQL, and APIs on the backend.

Architecture & technical leadership

System design, modernization, architectural decisions, mentoring, and technical direction while remaining hands-on.

High-scale product systems

Experience across Shopify Checkout, fintech, travel, healthcare systems, and other production systems with significant operational requirements.

Developer platforms & AI

Built and operated internal & external developer tooling, including Shopify's internal AI chat platform used by thousands of employees.

Experience

Shopify

Senior Software Engineer

April 2021 – August 2026

Product and platform engineering across Shopify Checkout, Checkout Extensibility, and internal AI developer tooling at Shopify scale.

Dev AI / Augmented Engineering

March 2025 – August 2026

  • ▹Launched, built, operated, and evolved an internal AI chat and developer platform used in the daily workflows of thousands of Shopify employees.
  • ▹Built production developer infrastructure around LLMs: full-stack React/TypeScript application work, a Node.js backend, LLM integrations, internal APIs, and developer-oriented workflows.
  • ▹Designed and implemented AI-assisted engineering capabilities intended to make AI useful inside real software-development workflows rather than functioning as a generic chat interface.
  • ▹Built integrations between the AI platform and Shopify internal systems, working across frontend/backend boundaries, application architecture, deployment, reliability, and developer experience.
  • ▹Contributed technically as the platform grew from an early internal tool into a broadly adopted product and helped shape the emerging Augmented Engineering function.

Checkout / Checkout Extensibility

April 2021 – March 2025

  • ▹Worked on Checkout Extensibility systems that enable merchants and developers to customize Shopify Checkout, a business-critical surface whose resulting checkout experiences are seen by hundreds of millions of people.
  • ▹Served as a key engineer on the initial Checkout Editor team, contributing to system design, application architecture, frontend architecture, data flows, API integration, developer interfaces, and core technical decisions.
  • ▹Built complex merchant-facing Checkout Editor behavior with React and TypeScript while working across the editor UI, application data, backend/platform capabilities, APIs, and checkout extensibility systems.
  • ▹Worked with internal-facing GraphQL APIs, application data contracts, platform services, and integration points connecting product UI to the underlying checkout platform.
  • ▹Designed and implemented the original secure tracking-script injection architecture for Checkout Editor, enabling extensibility while isolating checkout from malicious or unsafe code.
  • ▹Integrated checkout extensibility work with major Shopify systems including Shop Pay, Customer Accounts, and other checkout/platform teams, balancing system boundaries, compatibility, security, and cross-product behavior.

Red Ventures

Senior Software Engineer / Technical Lead

March 2018 – April 2021

Hands-on technical lead and senior engineer across travel-product modernization, full-stack web applications, and backend data/event systems.

ExpertFlyer / The Points Guy Travel

  • ▹Led the engineering effort to re-architect ExpertFlyer after it became part of The Points Guy / Red Ventures travel organization, while continuing to write production code.
  • ▹Helped define the new architecture, break apart and replace legacy functionality, determine implementation approaches, mentor engineers, and build rapid proofs of concept for technical evaluation.
  • ▹Built Go backend services, REST APIs, business logic, application workflows, and integrations as the primary backend foundation for the new ExpertFlyer architecture.
  • ▹Designed Go services and REST APIs that integrated with the existing legacy Java Struts application during the ExpertFlyer modernization without working on the Struts application itself.
  • ▹Contributed to the modern full-stack application using React and TypeScript alongside the Go backend architecture.

CreditCards.com

  • ▹Helped build and launch an advertising/customer-facing portal using React, TypeScript, and Node.js.
  • ▹Built separate Java backend functionality for event tracking and data processing, consolidating user/event information into shared ETL-style data flows after acquisitions within Red Ventures.

ABC Financial Services

Senior Software Engineer

September 2016 – March 2018

  • ▹Worked on a greenfield full-stack platform with React, TypeScript/JavaScript, Node.js, Java/Spring, PostgreSQL, SQL, REST APIs, and AWS-hosted production systems.
  • ▹Built user-facing React functionality and Node.js service-layer code connecting frontend behavior to backend services, APIs, business logic, and PostgreSQL-backed data.
  • ▹Contributed to application architecture, API design, relational data modeling/data flows, backend integration, and product/technical strategy.
  • ▹Worked across Java/Spring services and cloud-hosted infrastructure where appropriate while maintaining substantial hands-on full-stack ownership.

Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield

Systems Analyst Programmer III

October 2013 – September 2016

  • ▹Built and modernized a critical database-backed healthcare application used daily by medical facilities across Arkansas and designed to support thousands of users.
  • ▹Delivered substantial feature development, performance improvements, usability improvements, architecture work, application/data integration, and SQL/database development.
  • ▹Worked on complex healthcare workflows and production reliability for software depended upon by real healthcare organizations.
  • ▹Took on increasing technical responsibility over time, including mentoring junior developers and improving existing enterprise systems rather than simply maintaining them.

Baptist Health

Web Analyst

January 2012 – October 2013

  • ▹Developed an internal full-stack hospital application suite with authentication, single sign-on, configurable user roles, granular permissions, database-backed workflows, and internal web interfaces.
  • ▹Helped migrate important hospital workflows from mainframe-based processes into modern web applications across application logic, relational data, workflow design, and hospital-process integration.
  • ▹Maintained and supported more than 12 additional applications and databases while building and modernizing core hospital systems.

Acxiom

Configuration Management Intern

Conway, Arkansas

May 2011 – August 2011

  • ▹Automated categorization and documentation of large enterprise folder structures using Perl within an established configuration-management environment.
  • ▹Worked with Subversion and enterprise development processes while building scripts that traversed filesystem structures, categorized existing content, and reduced manual inspection/documentation work.

Selected Projects

Portaler

Real-time collaborative mapping platform for Albion Online

View source on GitHub

22K

monthly active unique users

15M

API requests

75K

Discord roles monitored

~$30/mo

Hetzner production server

Built and operated an open-source full-stack platform that grew to approximately 22K monthly active unique users and handled approximately 15M API requests, with a Discord integration monitoring roughly 75K user roles across 500 Discord servers while I operated it.

Designed the React/TypeScript frontend, Node/Express API services, PostgreSQL/Redis data layer, Discord OAuth and role-based access integration, Docker deployment, and production infrastructure for a multi-tenant, real-time collaborative mapping system used by many separate guilds and alliances, each with private mapping data and Discord-based access controls.

The production system ran on a roughly $30/month Hetzner server and typically consumed only 5–10% of available resources, leaving substantial headroom despite meaningful production traffic.

After I stopped maintaining Portaler, I archived the original repository and the open-source project moved into community development.

Technology: TypeScript · React · Node.js · Express · PostgreSQL · Redis · Docker

Education

Henderson State University

B.S., Computer Science

Military Service

U.S. Army National Guard — 39th Infantry Brigade Combat Team

Seven years of service while completing school and beginning my technical career, including a deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

April 2004 – April 2011

Trained or served across several specialties as responsibilities changed, including 25B Information Technology Specialist / Information Systems Operator-Analyst, 25F Network Switching Systems Operator-Maintainer, 11B Infantryman, 88M Motor Transport Operator, and 92Y Unit Supply Specialist.

  • ▹Performed military IT and communications-systems work involving deployment, installation, operation, troubleshooting, and maintenance of information systems, network/communications equipment, and telecommunications information-management processes.
  • ▹Documented technical procedures and requirements, prepared reports and system-related documentation, and helped coordinate technical and operational tasks.
  • ▹Developed early leadership and operational skills through task delegation, training other soldiers, planning and executing assigned tasks, adapting to changing requirements, ROTC participation, and military leadership training.