Richard Penner
Staff Engineer at Shopify
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Penner is a Staff Engineer at Shopify with 11 years of experience blending product and engineering leadership, currently based in Old Toronto. He transitioned from founding and scaling Figure 1 as Co-founder and CTO to product-focused roles at Shopify, demonstrating fluency in both building teams and shipping customer-facing platforms. His background spans mobile (iOS team lead at Kobo), backend systems, and full-stack engineering dating back to early .NET and C# work, reflecting a pragmatic, language-agnostic approach. Richard has hands-on indie app experience and a track record of moving between maker-mode and scaled-product environments, which informs a strong sense for product-market fit and technical trade-offs. Colleagues describe him as someone who bridges strategy and execution—comfortable coding in the trenches while steering product outcomes. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba and brings entrepreneurial grit to large-product engineering challenges.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Computer Science at University of Manitoba
Github Skills (68)
sendgrid10
shopify-cli10
nodejs-api9
caching9
tableplus9
transactional-emails9
activerecord8
braille8
twilio8
ascii-art8
console-application8
vector-tiles8
nodejs8
openstreetmap7
javascript7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
richardpenner/cloud-id
Feb 2020 - Oct 2020
Lists the cloud provider, given a hostname
Contributions:11 pushes, 2 branches in 8 months
hostname
richardpenner/lhistory
Feb 2026 - Mar 2026
Contributions:3 releases, 9 pushes, 1 branch in 1 month
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