Derek Guenther
Staff Software Engineer at Coinbase
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek Guenther is a Staff Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building performant, production-grade systems across fintech, crypto, and high-scale consumer products. Currently working on privacy for Base at Coinbase, he brings deep backend expertise honed at Iron Fish—where he contributed to a privacy-focused cryptocurrency’s core blockchain and CLI—and at IF Labs. Derek has led infrastructure and frontend efforts at Uber and built complex, canvas-based spreadsheet UIs at AlphaSheets, blending systems-level optimization with pragmatic product delivery. He’s repeatedly improved performance and scalability—e.g., memory-optimized block syncers and worker-thread integrations for blockchain sync—and shipped launch-ready mobile and web MVPs. Based in New York, he pairs hands-on engineering with technical leadership, mentoring teams and guiding architecture across startups and large orgs. A practical tinkerer, he often surfaces non-obvious optimizations that materially reduce latency and resource costs.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Computer Science, Bachelor of Science Computer Science at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Github Skills (10)
cryptocurrency10
rust10
back-end-development10
blockchain10
command-line9
cli9
command-line-interface9
multithreading7
testing7
nodejs7
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
iron-fish/ironfish
Mar 2021 - Jan 2023
A novel cryptocurrency focused on privacy and accessibility.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 releases, 1158 reviews, 245 commits in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the cryptocurrency project, making changes to both the core blockchain and the command-line interface (CLI). They implemented features such as adding transaction fees to payment confirmation messages and fixed relative import issues. Additionally, they refactored code, renamed logging tags, optimized memory usage in the block syncer, and integrated worker threads for improved performance.
privacyp2pblockchainfocusedcryptocurrency
iron-fish/ironfish-node-app
Oct 2023 - Jan 2025
Desktop app to run and manage an Iron Fish node
Contributions:3 releases, 158 reviews, 275 PRs in 1 year 3 months
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