Engineering Manager, Platform
Seven years in software engineering. I moved a custom rental platform onto Shopify Plus while the team shrank from 22 to 7, then built a team that ships without me in the room.
Selected work
Shopify doesn't support rentals out of the box. I designed a React-in-Liquid storefront, built the checkout functions that encode bundling, discounts and validation, and set up the build and staging pipeline.
Held the hiring bar, ran weekly 1:1s and quarterly reviews, and grew each engineer's scope on purpose.
32% of support tickets needed an engineer. I architected Claude skills over a knowledge base of recurring issues, then handed the platform to an engineer to own.
Off-the-shelf tools couldn't follow our rental flow, so I built a lightweight test in the Shopify theme and found the arm that wasn't recording conversions.
Grooms wanted to cover their groomsmen. Shopify can't do that natively, so I built it with a $0 product priced at checkout.
The job that charges late fees quietly stopped for weeks. I found the cause, rebuilt a month of missed charges day by day with Finance and Customer Care sign-off, and added checks so no customer was charged wrongly.
Projects
Tools I built to solve my own problems. Some are agent skills, some are full apps, all shipped end to end.
Crowd-sourced talent-show app for a friend's birthday. Guests answer prompts, react and upload photos from their phones; a projected display turns it all into a Spotify-Wrapped-style finale. Load-tested with simulated users before show night to keep Supabase broadcast costs in check.
Claude Code skill that reads a transaction export and writes a planner-style report: savings rate, trends, net worth, retirement projection. It compares against the last run, and any classification fix gets encoded into the Python engine so the next run starts sharper. Backs a Next.js dashboard with net-worth, FIRE and expense-split pages.
Picks the neighborhoods, researches restaurants and activities for each in parallel across Reddit, Tabelog and TripAdvisor, and layers the results around picks you already have from a CSV, Sheet or Notion page. Outputs Markdown, CSV or Google Sheets; a sibling skill exports a color-coded map for Google My Maps.
Scrapes Craigslist, Zumper, Zillow and Apartments.com into a single schema and a Google Sheet. Anti-bot sites are driven through a real Chrome session over CDP. A SQLite cache dedupes listings so a daily scheduled run only flags the new ones.
Turns a Monarch Money export into a seven-sheet workbook: per-account ledgers, shared-expense splits, category summary and a fixed-expenses ledger, then upserts it to Google Sheets. Runs as a script or conversationally as a Claude Code skill.
A metafield manager with namespace filtering and bulk operations, an admin block that stores customer fit measurements on the customer record, and a set of niche apps in progress, including an AI product-copy generator and an SEO autopilot.
Career
Before The Black Tux: Senior Analyst, Full Stack Developer at Avanade (2019–2021) and Software Engineer at Kitu Systems (2019).
“A rare breed of engineer that can tackle both the front end and back end at a high level while keeping the business and its goals at the forefront of every decision he makes.”
“A prolific contributor across software engineering disciplines, from consistently producing clean & reliable code to leading impactful team projects.”
“Thank you for taking ownership of the checkout integration project planning and scoping, and with proactively engaging with vendors to drive progress!”
“It looks so much more modern, and it draws attention to important steps for our customers!”
“You are always willing to help with expertise and an awesome attitude.”
Open to engineering manager and platform leadership roles. Based in San Diego.
albalmeo@gmail.com