Justin Smestad
Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify
Erie, Colorado, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJustin Smestad is a Senior Staff Engineer and seasoned tech leader with 10+ years building reliable, secure systems and engineering teams that ship without burning out. He combines hands-on architecture across Node, Elixir, Go, Ruby and data platforms with people-first leadership, having led teams at Shopify, Red Canary, Homebot and startups he founded or advised. Justin has a track record of reducing costs and risk—designing an identity system that cut EU verification costs by 80%—and specializes in security, big data, and scalable authentication. Based in Erie, Colorado, he also runs consultancy and product experimentation through Overstuffed Gorilla and Evalcode, helping companies align architecture, roadmap and hiring to meet growth. Notably, he founded Mongo Machine, an infrastructure-agnostic MongoDB management platform that was acquired, reflecting his product-building and M&A experience.
10 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science, B.S., Computer Science at University of Iowa
Spanish, English
Github Skills (45)
portable10
mitre-attack10
cybersecurity10
splunk10
security10
ids10
logging10
rule10
intelligent10
microsoft9
command-line-interface9
monitoring9
kubernetes9
analytics9
azure-cli9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
tvjust/Metadata_mapping_exif_data-475-2151_Rojas_Schoenfeld
Oct 2015 - Aug 2016
Contributions:15 pushes in 10 months
forensicinvestigationpythoninterestingenforcement
tvjust/atomic-red-team
Jan 2023 - Jul 2023
Small and highly portable detection tests based on MITRE's ATT&CK.
Contributions:10 pushes, 2 branches in 6 months
mitreportable
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