Andrew Valencik
Staff Software Developer at Shopify
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndrew Valencik is a Staff Software Developer based in Ottawa with 12 years of experience building resilient backend systems and leading engineering teams at Shopify. He blends deep practical expertise in Scala and functional programming with hands-on open-source contributions to high-profile Typelevel projects like cats, fs2, and http4s, where he improved core data structures and developer-facing documentation. His background spans data science and systems architecture—having productionized NLP pipelines and managed cloud deployments—bringing a data-informed approach to software design. He has experience managing and mentoring teams, having moved from senior engineer to manager and back to a staff engineering role, which gives him both technical credibility and people leadership skills. An instructor and former systems administrator, he retains a strong applied-academic perspective and attention to developer experience. Colleagues can expect a pragmatic engineer who values maintainability, clear documentation, and thoughtful refactors informed by functional-programming principles.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree, Applied Science, Master's Degree, Applied Science at Saint Mary's University
Github Skills (24)
git10
lib10
github10
top-level10
http10
git-repository10
chain10
data-structure10
scala10
typer10
stream10
fs10
applicative10
traverse10
data-structures10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
http4s/http4s
Jan 2021 - Jan 2023
A minimal, idiomatic Scala interface for HTTP
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:69 reviews, 107 commits, 24 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily focused on improving code quality and fixing documentation issues within the http4s library. They corrected and standardized documentation links, particularly `@see` references, across various core components, including `HttpDate`, `HttpVersion`, `Method`, and `Uri`. Additionally, they refactored code by inlining and deprecating internal functions, and they updated documentation to reflect changes related to mdoc, demonstrating a focus on maintainability and developer experience.
idiomatichttp-clientscalafs2typelevel
typelevel/cats
Sep 2022 - Sep 2022
Lightweight, modular, and extensible library for functional programming.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 reviews, 2 commits, 7 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Andrew contributed to the `cats` library by implementing and refactoring core functional programming features. Their work involved optimizing data structures like `NonEmptyList` and utilizing functional programming concepts such as `Applicative` and `Chain`. They also updated library code to use `Chain` in several `Traverse` and `TraverseFilter` methods, reflecting improvements to the underlying implementation. In addition, they made some minor updates to documentation related files.
functional-programmingtagless-finalscalamodularextensible
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