# George Dean > Software Engineer, Figma Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/georgedean I bring 16 years of professional software engineering experience spanning 29 companies, 10 languages, and tens of millions of users. I have spent the last 11 years pair programming, during which time I have been forced to defend, abandon, and refine my ideas through direct collaboration with over 150 developers. This is where I’m at: ➟ I believe in the power of tight feedback loops, especially pair programming, test-driven development, continuous delivery, user research, and weekly retrospectives. ➟ I seek to create clear ownership boundaries aligned with clear technical boundaries so that teams are empowered to achieve code, product, and operational excellence. ➟ I advocate for explicit, verifiable contracts for data moving within processes, data moving between processes, and data at rest — especially by way of statically typed languages and schema-on-write. ➟ I encourage software engineering teams to avoid debt and waste so that we can deliver value sustainably and respond to change immediately. ➟ I hypothesize that event sourcing — especially functional reactive programming and the kappa architecture — reduces accidental complexity in software systems by accurately representing facts and derived data. ➟ I aim to approach difficult conversations with curiosity, shifting away from the goal of message delivery and toward the goal of learning. ➟ I drive to colocate authority and accountability in self-organizing teams, empowering them to deliver end-to-end value instead of depending on others to succeed. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer, Creation Engine @ Figma Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States ### Staff Software Engineer, Transformation Products @ VMware Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco, California, United States I collaborated with a balanced team to build Panorama, the portfolio planning tool used by VMware R&D to organize people and projects, in Kotlin/Spring and TypeScript/React. I led the team to replatform Panorama from Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes on AWS, including infrastructure as code with Terraform and cdk8s, single sign-on, transport layer security, domain name resolution, data migration, and alerting. I made it safer and easier to change our codebase. I introduced a job in our CI pipeline to automatically detect breaking database migrations. I strongly typed our frontend React application by converting it from JavaScript to TypeScript, enabling safer refactors, better tests, and more powerful IDE support. ### Staff Software Engineer, Tanzu Labs @ VMware Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco, California, United States VMware acquired Pivotal on December 30, 2019. Pivotal Labs is now VMware Tanzu Labs. ### Principal Software Engineer, Pivotal Labs @ Pivotal Software, Inc. Jan 2012 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco, CA I drove business, product, and technical outcomes for 28 clients across many verticals, including aerospace, energy, banking, healthcare, and government. I served as technical lead on 15 projects for clients including Capital One, General Electric, United States Space Force, Gap, and CoreLogic. I employed a disciplined, agile approach to full-stack web and mobile development, working side-by-side with our clients on a daily basis to train and enable their development teams. A few highlights: ➟ I led a team to create a Kafka Streams data processing pipeline running in Kubernetes that aggregates raw data from 5 million SunPower solar devices into real-time metrics and alerts for residential and commercial customers. ➟ I led a team to extract a Python/Flask payments microservice from the DoorDash monolith with zero downtime while serving 10,000 requests/minute with a P99 response time of 80ms. ➟ I led a team to develop a real-time collaboration tool for autonomous airplane designers at Boeing using WebSockets with React, Typescript, and RxJS. ➟ I led a team to systematically eliminate technical debt in the GoDaddy Smartline Swift/iOS app by injecting dependencies, authoring tests, merging long-lived branches, and creating module seams. ➟ I led a team to build the Visa installment payments solution in Java/Spring, empowering 16,000 financial institutions to offer 3.3 billion cardholders the ability to split large purchases into smaller payments. ### Software Engineer @ Dynamic Graphics, Inc Jan 2008 – Jan 2012 | Alameda, CA I developed desktop applications for Windows and Linux in modern, test-driven C++ to enable geospatial analysis and visualization in the earth and environmental sciences. I made a broad range of contributions across our product portfolio, including 2D and 3D visualization, data import, inter-process communication, and database query optimization. I modernized our engineering practices by integrating a unit testing framework, running workshops on test-driven development and refactoring, and driving usability testing of our flagship product. I represented the business and technical interests of our company as co-chair of an industry-wide team to develop an open, non-proprietary standard for data exchange (RESQML). ## Education ### M.S. in Software Engineering Carnegie Mellon University ### Baskin Engineering at UCSC ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/gdean123 - GitHub: https://github.com/gdean123 --- Source: https://flows.cv/georgedean JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/georgedean/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-11