Richard Newman
Principal Engineer at Shopify
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Newman is a Principal Engineer with 18 years of experience building reliable telephony, sync, and modern microservice systems across desktop, web, and mobile platforms. He has led technical strategy and delivery at companies including Shopify, Stripe, AWS (Chime), and Mozilla, shipping consumer-facing features such as Firefox iOS improvements and Amazon Voice Focus for browser-based communications. Comfortable across TypeScript/JavaScript, backend services, and data storage/sync, he combines hands-on implementation with architecture, design review, and team mentoring. A longtime remote worker since 2010, he brings a pragmatic perspective on distributed collaboration and operational readiness that helped organizations navigate large-scale reliability and partner integrations. His open-source contributions span projects from Firefox and the Amazon Chime demo to Clojure libraries like Compojure and HoneySQL, reflecting a rare mix of front-end UX work and low-level server and tooling improvements. Trained to PhD level in computer science, he often pairs academic rigor with product-focused engineering to solve hard infrastructure and interoperability problems.
18 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at University of Reading
Github Skills (30)
wkwebview10
javascript10
ios10
amazon-chime-sdk10
ios-framework10
clojure-cli10
testing10
typescript10
user-interface10
clojure10
web-audio-api10
typescript-types10
ring10
swift10
typescripts10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios
Nov 2014 - Jan 2021
Firefox for iOS
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (iOS)
Mobile Developer (iOS)Contributions:4 reviews, 1289 commits, 394 PRs in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily focused on implementing and maintaining features for the Firefox iOS application. Their commits demonstrate a deep understanding of the iOS platform, specifically interacting with the WKWebView, WKNavigationDelegate, and UI elements such as toolbars and reader mode. The user contributed to history management by incorporating visit types and other related aspects, along with adding functionality for menu and quick search options, confirming their commitment to enhancing the user interface and experience within the mobile browser.
firefoxbrowserios-appswiftios
aws/amazon-chime-sdk-js
Sep 2020 - Jul 2021
A JavaScript client library for integrating multi-party communications powered by the Amazon Chime service.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:26 reviews, 44 commits, 26 PRs in 9 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily focused on enhancing the browser-based demo application for the Amazon Chime SDK. They implemented asynchronous audio input selection, improved the audio preview feature, and added support for Amazon Voice Focus integration, including managing its display state and enabling the feature. Additionally, they made updates to the code style, documentation, and dependencies, and corrected issues in the meeting readiness checker, showing they worked across multiple parts of the frontend application. They also made changes to test cases.
javascript-clientpartychimeclient-libraryjavascript
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