Nicholas Simmons Email & Phone Number

Ottawa, On, Ca

New York, Ny, Us

New York, Ny, Us

Responsible for building Nuvocargo's platform and creating a world-class engineering team.

Ottawa, On, Ca

Responsible for expanding and maintaining features of Shopify's core product offering. Focused on things that help merchants go from starting on Shopify to getting their first sale. My area encompassed 4 sub areas each with multiple teams. Built a strong leadership team with high autonomy and a culture of collaboration. Was also the engineering leader for B2B at Shopify. This was a 0 to 1 effort spanning 1.5 years that involved many interconnected projects all shipping together as a V1 release. B2B is a major need for Shopify merchants and will be a major driver of growth for Shopify in the future.

Ottawa, On, Ca

Founded and grew the Merchandising group to 2 teams of 8 developers each. Established a clear vision for the team, took ownership of a legacy part of the codebase and worked on improving the area for the long term while adding new functionality.Identified and investigated a significant performance issue, whose fix resulted in a significant reduction of errors and resource utilization across Shopify's core product.Following that, led 2 groups of Shopify’s core product:- Launch: focused on helping more merchants be successful during their onboarding experience.- Insights: focused on helping our merchants understand and improve their businesses through pervasive, guided and consumable analytics.Responsible for setting strategy and vision, creating and growing teams, and delivering value through strong merchant-focused teams.

Ottawa, On, Ca

Led the investigation and development of a server side rendering solution for Shopify's admin web app, used by hundreds of thousands of Shopify merchants every day. Built frameworks and DevOps tools to ensure that the service would meet the strict requirements of a highly scalable, high traffic service that merchants rely on as a key part of their business.Technologies:node.js, isomorphic ReactJS, Typescript

Ottawa, On, Ca

Led an engineering team focused on incubating and launching potential moonshots for Shopify. Products delivered include:Sello - A new commerce mobile app for aspiring merchants. Worked with the team to design and build a custom hybrid mobile framework. The app was eventually sunset after a lack of product market fit. Technologies: iOS and Android - custom hybrid mobile stack. Rails.Frenzy - A mobile app for flash sales that gives users a level playing field for the most hyped product drops from top brands. Technologies: iOS - Swift, Rails, MySQLAdvanced Cash on Delivery - A Shopify app that improves Cash on Delivery for Shopify merchants selling in India.Technologies: RailsPopup - A mobile curated product marketplace that connects buyers to Shopify merchant's products.Technologies: iOS - Swift, Rails, MySQL

Ottawa, On, Ca

Launched a rewrite of the store management interface for merchants, as well as actively contributing to the open source framework created at Shopify to build it - BatmanJS. After deciding to move away from BatmanJS, led the effort to move to a simpler front end solution that relied mostly on Rails and Turbolinks. The team shipped the complete rewrite in less than 8 months.Technologies:HTML, Coffeescript, Rails, MySQL

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Backend architect for game-specific and platform services. Responsible for design and development of complete end-to-end services; including technology decisions, DB schema, application logic, and infrastructure requirements.Provide technical guidance and leadership to a team of in-house developers and outsourcing partners. Act as a point of contact when issues arise and help resolve issues for services in production.Technologies:node.js, Java, MongoDB and MySQL.

Redmond, Wa, Us

Developed a new course for the Computer Science department at DigiPen titled "Introduction to Online Game Architecture". Topics included TCP/IP, HTTP, SOAP vs. REST, SQL and NoSQL databases, scalability and security.Researched material, prepared course content and slides, created assignments and course project.Provided 3 hours classroom instruction and 1.5 hours consultation per week to 20 students.

Redwood City, Ca, Us

Shipped titles: Restaurant City: Gourmet Edition (iOS)Designed and built a scalable back-end infrastructure for mobile social games in 9 months, including a stateless RESTful game server and Facebook integration via Graph API .Designed and implemented a consistent, decoupled game state and server communication layer in the mobile client app.Created a game data editor for designers that enabled them to easily update large minified JSON files.Took ownership of a web-based dashboard application for existing online MMO. Improved telemetry and reporting features that enabled better business decisions. Increased application responsiveness and reduced full page loads by using AJAX requests.Technologies:Game data editor - C# and WinFormsGame client - C# and Unity3DBackend - Java, CassandraDashboard web app - ASP.NET MVC and jQuery

Montreal, Qc, Ca

Developed new features for a large scale security solution (video surveillance, access control and license plate recognition).Implemented an event processing service for Genetec's AutoVu license plate recognition service. Increased resource efficiency by using less threads and memory, while also improving throughput.Integrated third party access control units, alarm panels and AutoVu LPR cameras via TCP/IP and serial protocols.Added support for Active Directory user authentication.Worked closely with technical support to diagnose and resolve issues for end users.Technologies:Microsoft CCR, C#, WCF, ADO.NET and MS SQL Server.

Montreal, Qc, Ca

Shipped 3 major releases of Omnicast video surveillance product, as well as the first release of access control system - Synergis, using exploratory and scripted testing techniques.Led development effort of automated Omnicast installation testing using TestPartner; Testing effort was reduced from several man-days to man-hours.Streamlined reporting process for test results by creating Excel templates and macros; reduced management review time.Took ownership of Synergis build process and installation packaging using InstallShield.

Executive Education, Leading Product Innovation

Executive Education, High Potentials Leadership Program

M.Eng, Information Systems Engineering

B.Compsci, Software Systems