Michael Mckenna
Globalization Engineering Leader
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Mckenna is a Globalization Engineering Leader with over three decades of experience designing internationalization, localization, and compliance infrastructure for major consumer and enterprise platforms. Currently at Block, he leads globalization engineering across Square, CashApp and Tidal, overseeing i18n architectures, AI machine translation, and localization pipelines that power global payments ecosystems. Previously he built and scaled world-ready engineering teams at PayPal, Yahoo, and Zynga, delivering standards-based Unicode/CLDR solutions and cutting international release cycles while embedding regulatory checks into onboarding flows. A founder of industry forums and a long-time consultant to Fortune clients, he combines executive strategy with hands-on engineering knowledge from Node and web stacks to database internals. He also contributes to high-profile open-source projects—adding multi-locale support to PayPal’s checkout components—demonstrating attention to UX detail across dozens of languages. Based in the Bay Area and educated at UC Berkeley EECS, he is known for translating cross-cultural complexity into pragmatic, measurable product outcomes.
11 years of coding experience
35 years of employment as a software developer
BS Electrical Engineering and Computer Science minor in Mechanical Engineeing, BS Electrical Engineering and Computer Science minor in Mechanical Engineeing at UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences (EECS)
Japanese, German
Github Skills (7)
internationalization10
localization10
javascript10
translation10
react9
html8
jsx8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
paypal/paypal-checkout-components
Feb 2018 - Feb 2021
please submit Issues about the PayPal JS SDK here: https://github.com/paypal/paypal-js/issues
Role in this project:
Localization / Internationalization Specialist
Localization / Internationalization SpecialistContributions:2 reviews, 5 commits, 9 PRs in 3 years
Contributions summary:Michael focused on adding and maintaining language support within the project. Their contributions primarily involved modifying configuration files and content files (jsx, js) to include translations for various user interface elements, including button labels, and window messages, across multiple locales. The work centered on incorporating new languages, such as Vietnamese and Romanian, and ensuring correct display of content based on user language preferences. Furthermore, they enhanced the project's organization by sorting the content files alphabetically by language.
paymentsreactiframejavascriptcheckout
paypal/tech-talks
May 2017 - Jun 2018
Place for all PayPalX presentations, tech talks, and tutorials, and the sample code and apps used in those.
Contributions:8 commits, 2 PRs, 1 comment in 1 year
placereacttech-talks
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