John Mertens
Senior Software Engineer at Scale to Win
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJohn Mertens is a senior software engineer with 15 years of experience building high-scale, product-focused systems from startup APIs to enterprise platform services. Based in Portland, he blends full-stack craftsmanship, rapid prototyping, and user testing with a civic-minded orientation rooted in early work at Code for America and Change.org. He has led engineering teams and platform architecture, driving simplification and efficiency across email systems that handle roughly a billion messages per month and high-impact user flows that power shares and revenue. As a former CTO/co‑founder he built large-scale text analysis, auto-categorization, and analytics pipelines, pairing engineering leadership with hands-on coding across Ruby, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and AWS. At Change.org he bridged ML research and product to ship AI-powered features, showing a comfort moving models from research into production. Known for pragmatic open-data advocacy and a habit of open-sourcing internal tools, he mixes civic purpose with production-grade engineering.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Computer Science, B.S. Computer Science at Iowa State University
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (123)
programming-language10
internationalization10
localization10
scalable10
translation10
elixir10
functional-programming10
compiler9
genstage9
alias9
symlink8
scraper8
broadway8
concurrent8
python7
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
VersaHQ/sidekiq-rack
Apr 2013 - Oct 2018
A simple rack app wrapper for sidekiq/web monitoring app
Contributions:10 commits, 2 PRs, 1 push in 5 years 7 months
web-appracksidekiqsidekiq-webweb-monitoring
VersaHQ/potatochop
Mar 2014 - Sep 2014
Contributions:71 commits in 5 months
hamlsimple-serversassmockups
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