# Churen (Chu) Shao

> Staff Software Engineer at Affirm

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

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Affirm
Jan 2021 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area
• Tech lead on the pricing foundations team, providing support to merchants on financing configurations for checkout. 
• Manage roadmaps and work closely with product and cross functional teams in defining and prioritizing features.
• Led discussions and created north star goals of pricing foundations for interfaces, scalability, and extensibility.
• Architected the core pricing configuration bundle system that lead a performance boost of over 100x.
• Built and launched dynamic experimentation of pricing configurations for all merchants.
• Took over and completed a 4 year migration that moved merchant pricing off of a monolith and onto its own service. 
• Defined and decoupled key pricing domain RPC endpoints from other systems and created internal SLAs.

### Senior Staff Software Engineer @ Udemy
Jan 2019 – Jan 2021
• Individual contributor on the growth engineering team supporting consumer marketing, pricing, and discounts.
• Led discussions and worked with stakeholders on translating product requirements into technical design documents. 
• Architected a pricing engine to support dynamic price strategies for discount campaigns.
• Mentored interns and lead design discussions in structuring a dynamic Google Adwords bid modifier platform.

### Senior Software Engineer @ Udemy
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area
• Designed and implemented a fully integrated and scalable affiliate network framework for on-boarding affiliates.
• Implemented a side project that scaled In App Purchases on iOS and Android from 500 courses to over 90,000 courses.

### Software Engineer II @ Udemy
Jan 2016 – Jan 2017
• Collaborated with Consumer Marketing and Business Development teams in developing internal & external tooling.
• Migrated legacy PHP and Javascript code to Django and Angular with over 95% test coverage.

### Software Engineer @ Udemy
Jan 2015 – Jan 2016
•  Contributor on the Growth Engineering team supporting Growth Marketing, BizDev, and International Expansion.

### Teaching Assistant @ Georgia Institute of Technology
Jan 2018 – Jan 2019
TA For Education Technology, mentoring ∼20 students per semester in delivering a project that relates to EdTech. 
Discussed and modified homework assignments to improve student readiness in reading publications and journals. 
Facilitate growth of students in research and applications of research in projects.

### Software Engineer @ CBS Interactive
Jan 2013 – Jan 2015
Replatforming B2B websites with 23 million monthly views, including ZDNet, Smartplanet, and TechRepublic.
Coded in various industry standard languages, including Symfony2 PHP, Twig, HTML5 and Javascript. Gained experience in managing and fixing bugs, implementing backend and api features, optimizing Solr search indexer and working as a full web stack engineer.

### Software Engineering Intern @ CBS Interactive
Jan 2013 – Jan 2013
Software Engineering Intern working with the B2B Group for CBS Interactive.

### COGS 121 Tutor @ UC San Diego
Jan 2014 – Jan 2014
Lead discussion and provide technical assistance in a cognitive science oriented class focused on implementing human computer interaction concepts in a mobile web application.

### Operations and System Support @ Ocean Observatories Initative
Jan 2011 – Jan 2013 | UC San Diego
Maintain and code networking monitor tools, including Cacti, Statseeker, Intermapper and Orion. Provide support for technical problems for the researchers of the group. Set up servers and install the necessary equipment for each rack.

### CSE 8B Tutor @ UC San Diego
Jan 2013 – Jan 2013
Tutor for CSE 8B Spring 2013, an Intro to Java course.

### CSE 3 Head Tutor @ UC San Diego
Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | UC San Diego
Head Tutor for CSE 3: Fluency in Information Technology. Work with the professor in creating homework, grading labs, and lead other tutors in providing a comprehension of technology to non-technical students.

### Software Engineer Intern @ BlueHornet, a Digital River Company
Jan 2012 – Jan 2012
Software Engineer Intern at BlueHornet.
Worked on a Numeric Field Type project that allowed users to add a field format utilizing numbers and doing both modifications to the number and formats.

### CSE 3 TA @ UC San Diego
Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | UC San Diego
Volunteered as a tutor for CSE 3 (Fluency in Information Technology). Explain key concepts in identifying Information Technology, provide lab help for students, and grade lab work. In addition, worked as a TA and grade quizzes, answer student questions, and help out lecture.


## Education
### Computer Science in B.S.
UC San Diego

### Master of Science - MS in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/chushao
- Portfolio: http://cshao.me
- GitHub: http://www.github.com/chushao

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Source: https://flows.cv/churen
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/churen/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12