# Julia Nguyen

> Artist, Community Organizer, Software Engineer 💜✨

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/julianguyen

Julia Nguyen (they/them) is a community organizer, artist, writer, keynote speaker, and staff / principal software engineer from Toronto / unceded Tkaronto land and based in San Francisco / unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land.

Julia has worked at Shopify, Intuit Mailchimp, Headspace, Indiegogo, Expedia, Minted, ThoughtWorks, Communitech, and Workopolis (now part of Indeed) in a broad variety of web and mobile engineering teams — infrastructure, growth, performance, product, customer support, payments, and design systems.

Julia created if-me.org, an open source nonprofit that builds a mental health communication platform and amplifies community activists and organizations, since 2014. Julia was one of the founding organizers of the San Francisco chapter of Write/Speak/Code and led mentorship initiatives at the University of Waterloo’s Women in Computer Science Club. At various tech companies, Julia has founded, and organized employee resource groups focused on disability and mental health justice.

Julia is driven by the sociological impact of technology — how it shapes and redefines culture and identity. They have written for publications like Model View Culture, Shameless Magazine, and AJ+. Julia is a proud speaker for Prompt (now part of Open Sourcing Mental Illness), a community of people in tech who give talks on navigating mental illness. Furthermore, Julia has spoken at conferences around the world like Lead Developer, QCon, and Dreamforce on software engineering, open source software, and mental health.

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Maven Clinic
Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States
- Tech lead of the Web Platform domain, driving northstar strategy and cross-domain collaboration.
- Re-architected the web monorepo with Nx, resolving performance bottlenecks across desktop, mobile web, and webviews. Built an internal package system for core services (auth, events, enums, types).
- Developed new telemetry and observability foundations — migrated from Sentry to Datadog RUM/Session Replay, created a Web Ops Dashboard, automated monitoring with Terraform, and trained design, product, and engineering teams.
- Led Web Ephemeral Environments — deployable, auto-shutdown dev instances in Garden/Kubernetes, replacing shared QA environments.
- Led Native AI strategy, standardizing developer tooling (Cursor, Figma, Jira), improving code reviews, and strengthening on-call incident detection across engineering.
- Led AI chatbot vendor evaluation, Messages app migration, AI chatbot integration, and Zendesk efficiency improvements, establishing best practices for AI adoption.
- Led web performance roadmap — automated deployment of assets to Google Cloud CDN, CI/CD pipeline optimizations, and implemented app-level optimizations (e.g. WebP migration, API batching).
- Migrated web apps from legacy authentication to a unified, optimized Auth0 implementation, with cross-platform observability.
- Migrated monorepo to LaunchDarkly for flags and built a custom events gateway for Snowplow with robust APIs.
- Owned front-end infrastructure for key apps: Member, Fertility Portal, MPractice Practitioner, and Messages.
- Defined standards for code ownership, package management, testing, and on-call expectations.
- Consultant for Design Systems, emphasizing maintenance, accessibility, and performance.
- Co-led Web Guild and strengthened company-wide guild system.
- Mentored web engineers on testing, performance, and accessibility; led interviews and revamped coding/design screens.

### Founder @ if me
Jan 2014 – Present
if-me.org is a free and open source mental health communication app translated in into thirteen languages and counting, with thousands of users. It is powered by Ruby on Rails, React, PostgreSQL, Webpack, CircleCI, and Heroku. I manage and mentor hundreds of developers, designers, writers, and other non-technical contributors from all over the world. I have given keynote talks about the project at Open Source Bridge, AnxietyTech, Write/Speak/Code San Francisco, and the Mental Health Association of San Francisco. We were featured on the Code Newbies Podcast and the Huffington Post Blog. From 2017 to 2020, we've been mentoring women developers for Rails Girls Summer of Code. Since 2016, we've participated in Hacktoberfest. In 2023, we were part of the first cohort of social impact open source projects in GitHub's Open Source (OS) Community Manager Program.

### Staff Software Engineer @ Shopify
Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States
- Part of engineering leadership for Web Platform (consisted of three teams) doing front-end infrastructure and web performance for core engineering — led the React JSX transform project for the massive web codebase, led the auditing and migration of 100+ observability dashboards, monitors, and alerts, developed a strong partnership with the Observability team and created a system for other engineering teams to tackle their migrations, and led efforts to improve and simplify current SSR implementations for performance
- Previously part of the cross-functional leadership (data, design, engineering, and product) for Shop Pay
Installments (consisted of four teams, in partnership with Affirm) — contributed to engineering strategy, led the project for expanding back-end infrastructure to enable international expansion, worked on the buyer data migration and sharding and the flexible pricing and plans projects, and created/facilitated a recurring staff+ engineering alignment sync
- On both the Web Platform and Shop Pay Installments teams: mentored and coached entry to senior level engineers, a primary reviewer for tech design docs, and a source of technical expertise through pair programming
- Created the Inclusive Meeting Guidelines, which can be adopted and customized by any team at Shopify

### Staff Software Engineer @ Intuit Mailchimp
Jan 2018 – Jan 2022 | Oakland, California, United States
- Engineering lead for the Customer Empowerment (Support) domain - domain lead (works directly with product, customer, and design leads) that oversees the engineering architecture and roadmap across both the internal and external customer support and knowledge tools teams
- Previous Engineering lead for the End-to-End domain (Growth, Discover and Engage, Onboarding, and New User Journey teams) — led projects for the front door (discovery tool) redesign, collapsible and accessible left nav, left nav performance improvements, improving experiment infrastructure, and the new app homepage redesign
- Previously on the Front-end Platform team developing best practices for migrating from Dojo to React and doing architecture work on the Growth and Commerce product teams: led initiatives to speed up front-end development workflow and the production deploy (built a strong partnership with the SRE team), and built a front-end API client used across engineering
- Leadership across front-end engineering: developed the Front-end Portal to consolidate all front-end and design system engineering documentation with Gatsby, pair programming with product engineers, including testing and accessibility, code reviewer for various product teams, developed the onboarding process for new hires, and advisor for design system, accessibility, and animation initiatives
- Interviewing leadership: developed the front-end engineering "Choose Your Own Adventure" interview process, trained interviewers, and conducted interviews for ICs and managers
- Chair of the Disability and Neurodiversity Alliance, the disability and mental health employee resource group
- Mentored entry to senior level engineers, especially from underrepresented groups, to get involved in giving conference talks and career growth coaching

### Senior Software Engineer @ Headspace Inc.
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco, California, United States
- Engineering lead on Headspace for Work, the B2B offering of the main product 
- Helping to build and maintain product roadmap, including navigating hundreds of multinational client relationships, due to the absence of hands-on product manager
- Architected and launched Headspace for Work MVP in less than 6 months
- Developing engineering best practices including improving test coverage and pull request review process
- Mentored engineers in the web chapter
- Created and maintained the design system for web and React app boilerplate 
- Worked with engineering leadership to improve the interview process and to create a more inclusive engineering culture

### Software Engineer II @ Indiegogo
Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco, California, United States
- Full-stack developer on the Backer, Performance, Front-end Architecture, Amplification, and Android teams
- Migrated Gulp to Webpack, open sourced Apple Pay JS testing stubs, and part of multiperk project for campaigns
- Engineering lead for Apple Pay for items and options, front-end API perk refactor, accessibility roadmap, and React spike
- Led projects to improve web performance and re-architect server and server-side rendering on campaign and home pages
- UI Champion, advocating for best practices for internal UI library
- Co-founded Diversity and Inclusion and Office Wellness committees
- Hack Week co-organizer and weekly code class instructor

### Android Developer @ We Read Too
Jan 2016 – Jan 2017
Redesigned and built the Android app for We Read Too (an iOS app created by Kaya Thomas in 2014), a book resource app with thousands of users featuring hundreds of books written by authors and characters of colour

### Software Development Engineer I @ Expedia, Inc.
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco, California, United States
- Engineering lead for voice search using the SoundHound API in the Android app
- Engineering lead for hotel map search and filtering using Google Maps API, RxJava, and Kotlin
- Engineering lead for supporting hotel room cancellations in the mobile API

### Software Engineer @ Minted
Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | San Francisco, California, United States
- Led the development of a new feature to detect overset text on envelopes
- Improved the usability of e-commerce features such as address book tool, the order details page, and the help page
- Instrumented Google Analytics for Salesforce and performed research on post-order price adjustments

Technologies: Node.js, Backbone, Django, Python, SASS, MySQL, Bower, Mocha, Chai, Sinon, PyTest

### Application Developer @ ThoughtWorks
Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Added a photo-sharing feature to the Ruby on Rails app for RapidFTR, an open-source app to keep track of children during emergency situations
- Contributed to the iOS app for Democracy Now!, a non-profit, independent news program
- Built a custom WordPress website and publications database/search engine for Well Living House, a research centre for First Nations / Indigenous health at St. Michael’s Hospital

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, iOS, WordPress, Objective C, Clojure, PHP, jQuery, SASS, SQLite, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Frank, Rspec, Capybara, Cucumber, Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Balsamiq

### Application Developer @ Communitech
Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
- Optimized and added features to a cross-platform mobile application for golf course pest management in Adobe Flex
- Developed an in-house web application for tracking mentor hours using Node.js
- Developed a web application for recruiters to match job seekers with career opportunities in Ruby on Rails

Technologies: Flex, PhoneGap, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Backbone, ActionScript, SASS, MongoDB, CouchDB, Rspec, Capybara, Cucumber, Jasmine, Balsamiq

### User Interface Developer @ Workopolis (part of Indeed)
Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Wrote interfaces for job postings, employer profiles, the database updater, and the employee website using JavaScript, jQuery, and AJAX
- Developed an accessibility roadmap

Technologies: jQuery, AJAX, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Axure


## Education
### Honours Bachelor of Computer Science in Co-operative Education, Software Engineering Option, Computer Science
University of Waterloo

### International Baccelaureate Diploma in French Diploma
Michael Power St. Joseph High School


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nguyenjulia
- Website: https://julia.tech

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Source: https://flows.cv/julianguyen
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/julianguyen/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22