Denis Zgonjanin - Co-Founder at Downpay

Denis Zgonjanin

Co-Founder at Downpay

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

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Summary

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Senior

🎓

Top School

Denis Zgonjanin is a seasoned software leader and founder with 16 years of experience building products, teams, and scalable systems across startups and large enterprises. Currently a Co-Founder at Downpay, he blends full-stack engineering, data platform leadership, and DevOps to help eCommerce brands grow while retaining a hands-on approach to shipping features. At Shopify he led Data Applications, shaping reporting, governance, and discovery tools used company-wide, and earlier co-founded DataCats, delivering CKAN-based open data platforms to governments. An active open-source contributor, Denis has made meaningful backend and UI contributions to the widely used CKAN project, improving dataset patching, datastore encoding, and form handling. He pairs entrepreneurial grit from founding multiple companies with deep technical breadth—from front-end templating to backend authorization and Celery integration—making him adept at turning complex requirements into practical, production-ready solutions. Based in Ottawa, he combines pragmatic engineering with product and operational experience that accelerates both growth-stage startups and mission-critical platforms.

15 years of coding experience

14 years of employment as a software developer

B.Eng Engineering Software, B.Eng Engineering Software at Carleton University

Stackoverflow

Stats

860reputation

28kreached

20answers

5questions

Github Skills (24)

catalog10

python10

ckan-extension10

templater10

template-engine10

open-data10

ckan10

api10

template-tags10

schema10

postgresql9

front-end-development9

gettext8

celery8

testing8

Programming languages (8)

TypeScriptHandlebarsJavaScriptXSLTHTMLJupyter NotebookRubyPython

Github contributions (5)

ckan/ckan

Apr 2014 - Sep 2015

CKAN is an open-source DMS (data management system) for powering data hubs and data portals. CKAN makes it easy to publish, share and use data. It powers catalog.data.gov, open.canada.ca/data, data.humdata.org among many other sites.

Role in this project:

Backend & DevOps Engineer

Contributions:19 commits, 6 PRs, 22 comments in 1 year 4 months

Contributions summary:Denis primarily contributed to the backend logic of the CKAN data management system. Their work included implementing a patch method for datasets and adding authorization checks. They also improved the package patch method, fixed encoding issues in the datastore, and addressed issues in the celery integration by providing default configuration values and error handling. The user also implemented boolean validator tests.

portalspythondatadata-catalogdbpedia

ckan/ckanext-scheming

Jan 2015 - Mar 2015

Easy, shareable custom CKAN schemas

Role in this project:

Full-stack Developer

Contributions:8 commits, 2 PRs, 4 comments in 1 month

Contributions summary:Denis primarily worked on enhancing the user interface and form handling aspects of the `ckanext-scheming` extension, which suggests a focus on the front-end and templating aspects. Their commits involve the creation and modification of organization and group forms, as well as adjustments to data display within the CKAN environment. They also addressed localization issues.

ckanckanextshareableschemas

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