Joseph Smarr
Principal Engineer at Shopify
Summer Village of Half Moon Bay, Alberta, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJoseph Smarr is a principal engineer and startup CTO with 15+ years building intelligent web and AI systems, from early Plaxo NLP features to core components of Google Assistant and founding work on Google+ and Google Photos. He blends product-focused technical leadership with hands-on engineering, having led teams at Google, Triller (as CTO), and now Shopify driving creator and social integrations. Known for shipping advanced interactive web apps and automated text processing, he excels at turning research-grade ideas into scalable products that empower people to solve everyday information problems. Based in rural Alberta but operating at global scale, he prefers startup energy and repeatedly returns to roles where rapid iteration and founder-like ownership matter. An uncommon throughline in his career is a longstanding obsession with using NLP and conversational tech to reduce menial information work—demonstrated from Plaxo’s email parsing to Google Assistant.
15 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
MS Symbolic Systems, MS Symbolic Systems at Stanford University
Github Skills (21)
datetime9
database8
plovr7
dart6
protobuf4
google-map3
pyodide3
datasette3
serialization2
openstreetmap2
webassembly2
maps2
google-maps2
radius2
google2
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
jsmarr/timezone
Apr 2019 - May 2021
Time zone database and time zone aware DateTime object for Dart.
Contributions:2 PRs, 7 pushes, 2 branches in 2 years
datetimezonedartdatabasetime-zone
jsmarr/protobuf
Feb 2019 - Feb 2019
Runtime library for Dart protobufs
Contributions:5 pushes, 1 branch in 1 day
protobufruntimedartprotobufsruntime-library
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