# Scott Sellman > Software Engineering @ Highnote | Operational Excellence | Resilient Systems | Engineering Culture Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/scottsellman Developer and technical leader with 20+ years of experience across various domains. I believe in the importance of spending time to understand and get feedback from your customers to build the right product. I believe that everyone on the team needs to have ownership of their products and demonstrate operational excellence for the entire life of their applications. I also believe in prioritizing the well being of every individual on the team and when you do that, they will deliver outstanding results. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Highnote Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States ### Director of Engineering @ PayPal Jan 2017 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States Checkout Experiences (Web) Oversaw SDK and next-generation checkout features on the web platform. Helped the team to deliver a new checkout flow pilot under a tight deadline to meet merchant timelines ahead of the holiday season. Worked to support and engender a more discipline culture that embraced operational excellence. Led a hiring initiative for all Checkout teams needing full stack developers that added 40+ engineers across teams inside and outside my organization within 6 months. Consumer Financial Services Worked to build the architectural roadmap for PayPal’s new High Yield Savings product, while constructing the engineering organization that would deliver it. Brought to market PayPal’s bill payment and 2nd generation direct deposit functionality on both web and mobile experiences. Oversaw and drove the hiring process for both part-time and full-time employees within the organization, adding approximately 40 engineers in total across all disciplines. Xoom Partnerships Oversaw a multi-year strategy to re-architect Xoom's funds-out integration platform from a monolith into a micro-service-based architecture containerized with Docker and eventually deployed to GCP. Developed an implementation strategy that enabled seamless execution between the new and old and delivered on a promise to increase the throughput of new integrations concurrently. The new architecture led to near elimination of post-deployment incidents, dropped deployment time to a couple of hours, and facilitated a 50% decrease in engineering time to launch new partnerships. Realized double-digit percentage declines in transactions impacted by outages and major declines in customer contacts to our call centers. This was achieved through both collaboration between engineering, product, and operations as well as through major enhancements to issue identification and resolution. ### Engineering Manager, Partnerships @ Xoom Corporation Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 Matured Xoom's funds-out platform into a highly fault tolerant system that integrated to hundreds of banking systems residing across the globe. Frequently collaborated with members from QA, Product, Customer Service, Operations, Field Services, Treasury, Compliance, Fraud, and Accounting to ensure all organizational requirements are satisfied. ### Team Lead / Sr Software Engineer @ Xoom Corporation Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 Led the development of Xoom's ETA system, which provided down-to-the-second predictions for all critical steps in a money remittance. At launch this was the most accurate prediction engine within the remittance industry. Optimized architecture of integrations platform by building reusable frameworks, shifting development practices to follow conventions, and restructuring code to be configuration based. This resulted in the ability to deliver core development of new integrations in a couple days instead of two weeks. ### Team Lead - Software Development @ Commission Junction Jan 2008 – Jan 2011 Built out the SF-based scrum team. Redesigned CJ’s member area by migrated backend functionality into generic RESTful services and revamping the experience stack initially using Flex and later with JQuery and JavaScript. Overhauled product catalog data transfer system to scale with the ever-increasing demand. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Commission Junction Jan 2006 – Jan 2008 | Westlake, CA Optimized performance and maintainability of Commission Junction’s two primary J2EE applications (Spring, Spring MVC, Struts, Hibernate, Oracle). This was accomplished by phasing in new technologies and APIs, increasing automated test coverage, and improving architectural design. Spear-headed design and implementation of web services interface to CJ's aggregated product catalog, built on top of a distributed platform using Lucene, XFire, Hibernate, Spring, and Oracle. Currently the service provides access to over fifty million products from over a thousand merchant catalogs. Redesigned product catalog delivery system for BFast platform to use concurrent utilities that doubled throughput and reduced code complexity. ### Software Engineer @ United Online, Inc Jan 2003 – Jan 2006 | Woodland Hills, CA Led team of three others in development of a data management system, which utilized Tomcat, JSP, Oracle, AJAX, and CSS. Developed a series of ad hoc web-based applications for analyzing quality and performance of Netzero's applications. The end result increased speed of release process and reduced the number of bugs found in production environments. Provided periodic training session for team/department covering such topics as design patterns, open-source frameworks, development methodologies, and software quality analysis. ### Automation Engineer @ Openwave Systems Jan 2001 – Jan 2002 Built, executed, and documented automated test suites for Openwave's mobile browser and email management software ## Education ### Bachelor of Science in Computer Science UC Santa Barbara ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/scott-sellman --- Source: https://flows.cv/scottsellman JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/scottsellman/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-10