Curriculum Vitæ

Contact

Wil Lee
San Francisco, CA, United States
❦ 1 (206) 552-8604 (mobile) ❦

Summary

I'm a software engineer with a decade of experience in frontend web app product development using the usual suspects: , , and . I have specialized experience in modern frontend tooling, including , , , and React. I'm passionate about languages — both human and programming alike — and that's drawn me to projects involving internationalization and domain-specific languages.

Additionally, I am also full-stack, having worked extensively with , , , , , , , and data modeling in relational databases. I'm also no stranger to hardware, and am familiar with basic low-level programming on hobbyist devices.

Experience

  1. Patreon (Senior Software Engineer) September 2019 — April 2021
    • Architected and led a year-long effort (involving a dozen engineers on the Frontend Core, Backend Core, and Developer Experience teams) to add internationalization (i18n) support to Patreon.com, enabling Patreon to expand from 1 locale (US English) to 24
      • Created cross-functional engineering guidelines for all product engineers to follow when retrofitting a 5-year-old codebase with 100k+ lines of code to be i18n-compatible
      • Defined the i18n Readiness technical roadmap for frontend toolchains as well as backend services
      • Served as the primary liaison for orchestrating end-to-end pipelines with the 3rd-party translation platform
      • Designed and implemented the entire frontend toolchain, including the pivotal Babel+React compiler plugin responsible for scanning, extracting, and replacing user-facing text
      • Implemented a backend locale negotiation strategy accounting for jurisdiction and geolocation
    • Stewarded a cross-company initiative to evolve the design system from a set of optional components to the foundation of all new product development for dozens of engineers
      • Roadmapped the visual and typographic identity with members of the design team, solicited feedback directly from product engineers
      • Created and refreshed dozens of React components
      • Established accessibility (a11y) compliance across the board: set goals for all product teams, created relevant dashboards, and implemented automated compliance checks
      • Held office hours for product engineers and reviewed their code contributions
    • Overhauled every development toolchain check, scan, and fix by cost and priority
      • Pushed formatting tools down to local integrations and pulled costly checks up to pre-deploy CI jobs
      • Created and maintained a central repo for all in-house lint rules
      • Drove the adoption of for end-to-end user testing to streamline our QA process
    • Served — as a senior engineer — on the Architectural Review Team, a company-wide committee formed of staff-level engineers responsible for making long-term technical decisions and fostering a strong engineering culture
  2. Urbandoor, acquired by Airbnb (Senior Software Engineer) December 2015 — May 2018
    • Worked as a founding engineer to create the React-powered marketplace app, which served all corporate housing searches
    • Spearheaded the creation of a design system (in collaboration with designers) to establish a clean, strong visual identity
      • Implemented layout primitives on top of a CSS styling framework and established typographic conventions
    • Established — as the Marketplace project lead — frontend development best practices and style guides
    • Drove the adoption of TypeScript and mentored all newly-hired frontend engineers
  3. Twitter (Software Engineer) June 2012, June 2013, January 2014 — December 2015
    • Started full-time on the Commerce team and worked on a React project that bridged with legacy architecture
    • Interned on the Revenue Frontend team and worked on Twitter Ads, a Rails app

Education

  1. University of Washington, Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science (2009 - 2013)