Derek Watson
Senior Vice President Of Engineering at Tubi
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
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RockstarDerek Watson is a seasoned technology executive with 15+ years building high-impact products and scaling engineering organizations across Canada. He has led teams from early startups to global platforms—most recently directing up to 220 engineers at Shopify and now running data and content engineering as SVP at Tubi’s Toronto site. Derek has a track record of shipping mission-critical systems (checkout, authentication, streaming video) and turning guerrilla AI prototypes into production features like Shopify Sidekick. He’s skilled across front-end and back-end stacks—React/React Native, Rails, Node, cloud infra—and pragmatic about developer productivity and platform safety. Notably, he blends hands-on rapid prototyping with people-first leadership, having grown diversity and trust while preparing companies for exits and scale. Based in Toronto, he’s obsessive about applying generative AI to product discovery and team enablement, not just research for its own sake.
15 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
English
Github Skills (110)
parser10
uri10
json-api10
god10
parsing10
parse10
stringify10
javascript9
browser9
api9
primus9
creator9
scopes9
polling9
manipulation9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
Emerson/javascript-fundamentals
May 2015 - May 2021
Javascript Essentials
Contributions:3 PRs, 2 comments in 6 years
javascript
derek-watson/jsUri
Jul 2010 - May 2015
Uri parsing and manipulation for node.js and the browser.
Contributions:1 release, 128 commits, 10 PRs in 4 years 11 months
manipulationstringifybrowserurinode-js
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