Damian Gerow is a Principal Engineer based in Canada with 11 years of professional experience building secure, reliable infrastructure and payment systems. He has progressed from hands-on systems and network roles at BlackBerry through security-focused leadership at Shopify—where he rebuilt financial operating environments and grew an infrastructure security team—to engineering and managerial roles at FreshBooks, Top Hat, and now Coconut Software. Damian blends deep operational expertise (kernel tuning, SELinux, TLS, PKI, LUKS/TPM) with DevOps practices to harden production services and automate secure deployments. He is a pragmatic leader who pairs technical coaching with problem-framing to ensure teams solve the right problems at scale. An active contributor to the ActiveMerchant project, he has applied his payments and security knowledge to improve gateway integrations and TLS configurations for real-world payment flows. Colleagues describe him as the kind of engineer who improves both the codebase and the operational playbook, quietly reducing risk while increasing velocity.
Active Merchant is a simple payment abstraction library extracted from Shopify. The aim of the project is to feel natural to Ruby users and to abstract as many parts as possible away from the user to offer a consistent interface across all supported gateways.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:15 commits in 10 months
Contributions summary:Damian primarily contributed to the `active_merchant` library by modifying payment gateway integrations. Their work included fixing SSL/TLS configurations for payment gateways like PsiGate and Borgun. The user also updated the library by removing outdated configurations and bumping the version number, ensuring that it remains current and secure. Additionally, the user updated and maintained the testing suite for the Authorize.Net gateway.
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Damian Gerow - Principal Engineer at Coconut Software