# Carter McCardwell

> Engineering @ Column

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/cartermccardwell

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Column
Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area

### Senior Software Engineer, Payments @ Airbnb
Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area

### Software Engineer @ Airbnb
Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area
Software Engineer with the Payments Gateway team. Contributed to & built out Airbnb's payment gateway responsible for transmitting billions of dollars in over twenty currencies with a focus on payment routing, new processor/gateway integrations, and conducting payments in highly regulated regions such as Brazil & India.

- Designed & built Airbnb's next generation rule-based smart payment routing system.
- Contributed to the setup, and ongoing support, of a new local payment entity in Brazil.
- Tech lead on a project to integrate a new credit card gateway covering all aspects of the payment lifecycle including vaulting, the core transaction flow, SCA/3DS (both proactive & reactive), L3 data transmission, chargeback handling, and redundancy with other card gateways.
- Performed operational duties supporting existing integrations and responded to incidents/processor issues.
- Tech lead on Airbnb's pay-by-bank capability allowing guests to pay for their reservations using a linked bank account (and save money on the booking in the process). Designed and led building the end-to-end experience including the flow to add an account, the underlying ACH processing, and handling exception cases.

### Student Researcher @ Northeastern University College of Engineering
Jan 2014 – Jan 2018 | Boston, Massachusetts
Specifically the Northeastern Computer Architecture Research Group (NUCAR)
- Researching high performance computing applications and how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of GPGPU (general purpose computing on graphics processing units).
- Writing code utilized by graduate students to write their theses.
- Contributing and writing components for Hetero-Mark, a High Performance Computing (HPC) benchmarking suite funded by the HSA Foundation.

Student Cluster Competition (Competed 4 times at SC 2015/16/17, ISC 2017)
- Built custom supercomputers from scratch to run scientific datasets as quickly and efficiently as possible
- Achieved the competition record of the HPCG benchmark at ISC'17 in Frankfurt, Germany
- Awarded 5th place out of 16 teams at SC'17 in Denver, CO
- Evaluated performance of scientific applications and optimized them for the system
- Won the "MacGyver Award" for sourcing and building an HPC cluster in 6 hours at SC'15 in Salt Lake City, Utah after our original system was lost in the mail

### Software Engineer [Co-op/Internship] @ Intuit
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | San Diego, California
Helped design and implement microservices to replace a legacy monolith tax return filing system that supports millions of TurboTax users.  Worked extensively with Spring, different types of databases (Oracle, Couchbase, DynamoDB), AWS, and J2EE.  Also contributed to a system for managing database transactions across multiple data sources for robust and fault-tolerant operation.

### Systems/Computer Engineering [Co-op/Internship] @ Amazon Robotics
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | North Reading, MA
- Developed and implemented a system to improve warehouse productivity across Amazon's distribution network.
- Built and scaled a high-performance back-end service to handle real-time events from Amazon's production fulfillment network using AWS infrastructure
- Analyzed fulfillment technology spending to identify inefficiencies and to drive cost savings.
- Developed custom data visualization tools to help managers and system engineers understand and digest complicated real-time datasets.

### Engineering Intern @ MITRE
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Bedford, Massachusetts Campus
Intern for J43E - Mission Oriented Information Systems
Project 1: Worked on improving the usability and dynamic customizability of a MITRE custom bistatic realtime radar processing application. This was accomplished by modularizing the discreet processes into an on-the-fly modifiable data-flow application using a real-time data-flow framework called Pothosware (similar to Apache Storm).

Project 2: Improved the firmware of a test GPS satellite transmitter to speed up setup times at the beginning of each test. Also added functionality to change runtime parameters over a network connection to avoid having to completely rebuild and reprogram the transmitter before each test.


## Education
### Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
Northeastern University


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/cartermccardwell
- Website: http://mccardwell.net
- Website: http://www.ece.neu.edu/groups/nucar/research.html
- Website: https://github.com/cartermc24

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Source: https://flows.cv/cartermccardwell
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/cartermccardwell/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-05