# 🦛 Nick Wu

> Senior Software Engineer @Affirm | Previously @Shopify @Hootsuite

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

Portfolio: https://nickwu241.github.io
Blog: https://medium.com/@nickwu241

## Work Experience
### Senior Software Engineer @ Affirm
Jan 2022 – Present
• Led a 6-person team to build Affirm’s first-generation Data Lake (Apache Iceberg), saving $2M/year, accelerating batch pipelines by 40%, and improving dataset availability by 67%.

### Software Engineer II @ Affirm
Jan 2020 – Jan 2022
• Migrated from AWS Redshift to Snowflake, cutting costs by 75% ($800K → $200K annually) and ensuring reliability ahead of peak BFCM (Black Friday / Cyber Monday) 2020 traffic.
• Designed a Spark Privacy Pipeline handling 2,500+ monthly data requests, preventing $2.5M/month in potential regulatory fines.
• Scaled the pipeline to process 500B+ events per run on Amazon EMR with 3,000 cores and 20,000+ tasks, ensuring reliability at scale.

### Software Engineer @ Affirm
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020
• Solely architected an analytics (DBT) platform running 350+ datasets with CI/CD and monitoring, enabling 30+ analysts to set up in 10 minutes (vs. 2 days), automate weekly deployments (vs. 6 hours), and prevent SLA breaches from broken models.

### Teaching Assistant @ The University of British Columbia
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019
• Taught Introduction to Relational Databases (CPSC 304).

### Software Engineering Intern @ Shopify
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018
• Built a Scala service to validate 400,000 SQL queries against bi-weekly PrestoDB upgrades to detect backwards compatibility breaks and performance regressions.
• Developed a full-stack application to visualize deployments, resources, and permissions; created metrics and alarms to minimize security risks.
• Shipped a macOS application to simplify authentication from 6 to 2 steps for data services.
• Created a CLI to manage deployments, enabling self-served services such as Presto, Mode, YARN, Azkaban for teams.

### Software Developer Intern @ Hootsuite
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017
• Embraced immutable infrastructure for internal services by using: Terraform to develop IaC (Infrastructure as Code), Ansible to configure AWS instances, and Packer to build Docker images.
• Automated granting and revoking access to machines, databases, and GitHub to reduce 60 hours of work to 1 hour of work per month.
• Created Role-Based Access Control for services to enable SOC2 security and privacy compliance.

### Undergraduate Researcher @ The University of British Columbia
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017
• Reduced 50-100% overhead in CPU tracing by DINAMITE, a software performance analysis tool, through using the RTDSC instruction to capture timestamps.
• Established Java support for DINAMITE by implementing CPU tracing using JVM TI to communicate with C libraries, ASM to inject bytecode instructions, and Java’s instrumentation API to attach a Java agent.

### Software Developer Intern @ Safe Software
Jan 2016 – Jan 2016
• Implemented the Teradata format using Java (JDBC), allowing clients to read from and write to Teradata databases.
• Migrated C++ compiler from VS 2015 to 2017 for 800+ projects, enabling C++11 features.
• Wrapped 3rd party libraries and re-design interfaces to fix DLL boundary issues.


## Education
### Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering
The University of British Columbia


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nick-wu
- Portfolio: https://nickwu241.github.io

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Source: https://flows.cv/nickwu
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/nickwu/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-29