Senior Software Developer
Building reliable systems by day, hunting hidden caches by weekend — a software developer who finds equal satisfaction in elegant code, a well-placed geocache, and whatever rabbit hole LLMs have opened up this week.
About
Rob is a Senior Software Developer at Shopify, where he's spent the better part of a decade working across the stack on systems that need to be fast, reliable, and built to scale. He gravitates toward the interesting problems — the ones that don't have obvious answers and reward careful thinking over quick fixes.
Outside of shipping code, Rob has a genuine curiosity about where technology is headed. He's particularly fascinated by LLMs and what they make newly possible — both as a practitioner who can build with them and as someone who reads widely about the field. That curiosity carries into his other hobby: geocaching, which scratches a similar itch. Finding the unfindable, reading a landscape carefully, and appreciating the effort someone else put into hiding something well.
Rob and his family made the move from British Columbia to Orleans, Ontario in 2019 and haven't looked back. When he's not at a keyboard or out with a GPS device, he's likely buried in a book.
Current role
Senior Software Developer
Employer
Shopify
Based in
Orleans, ON
Originally from
British Columbia
Core skills
Software Engineering
Full-stack development with an eye for system design, performance, and maintainability. Comfortable working across layers of the stack and bridging the gap between a product requirement and a production-ready solution.
Distributed Systems
Experience building and scaling systems at Shopify's level of traffic and reliability requirements. Familiarity with the failure modes, trade-offs, and operational realities that only emerge at scale.
AI & LLM Integration
A genuine interest in large language models that goes beyond the hype — understanding how they work, where they fail, and how to build useful things with them responsibly. Actively experimenting with applied AI tooling.
Technical Problem-Solving
Drawn to problems that reward careful decomposition — breaking a gnarly bug or an ambiguous requirement into something tractable and then following the thread until it's solved properly.
Collaboration & Communication
Experienced working across teams in a remote-first environment. Clear communicator who can explain a technical decision to a non-technical stakeholder without losing the important nuance.
Continuous Learning
A genuine reader — of technical writing, research papers, and broader non-fiction — who applies the same curiosity at work as everywhere else. Keeps up with the field not because it's required, but because it's interesting.
Tools & technologies
Experience
Senior Software Developer
Beyond the keyboard
Geocaching
There's something genuinely satisfying about standing in a place you've never stood before because someone decided to hide something there. Rob and Jennifer geocache together across the Ottawa region — it turns an ordinary walk into a small expedition, and occasionally reveals a corner of the city worth knowing about. A recent family trip to London and Paris expanded their territory considerably, with caches found in both cities.
Saga — a programming language
Rob is building Saga from scratch: a programming language designed to be LLM-ready and genuinely pleasant to use, with the kind of elegance and expressiveness that a discerning engineer actually appreciates. It's the sort of project that asks hard questions about language design and forces careful answers.
Large Language Models
Rob follows the LLM field closely — reading research, building tools, and thinking through what these systems make newly possible. That curiosity led directly to Saga: a language conceived from the ground up with LLM interaction in mind, not bolted on as an afterthought.
Cooking & Authentic Cuisine
Rob has a love for tracking down authentic recipes from around the world — the real versions, not the simplified ones — and bringing them to the family table. It's part research project, part creative outlet, and the best experiments tend to become household staples.
Reading
A committed reader across genres — technical writing, history, science, and wherever curiosity leads. Books are how Rob processes ideas more slowly and carefully than the internet usually allows, and a good one has a habit of showing up in how he approaches a problem at work a few weeks later.