Stephen Gardner
Founder & CTO at Blaze SMS
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolStephen Gardner is a founder and CTO with 11 years of experience building high-growth ecommerce SaaS and mobile-first web platforms from idea to profitable scale. He currently leads BlazeSMS, an AI-powered SMS marketing suite for Shopify that blends conversational AI, inventory-aware agentic sales, and NLP-driven segmentation to boost merchant conversions. As founder of Shop Sheriff he built widely adopted Shopify apps (AMP, PWA) that serve thousands of merchants and hundreds of Shopify Plus stores, earning top ratings and significant traffic. Stephen’s full-stack expertise centers on the MEAN stack, real-time systems, and scalable cloud deployments—skills honed across startups in marketplaces, lead-gen, and consumer tools. He has a track record of shipping lightweight, high-traction products (including a past widget with hundreds of thousands of users) and turning integrations with complex inventory and messaging systems into seamless merchant experiences. Based in Washington, D.C., he combines hands-on engineering with product-driven entrepreneurship and a knack for making AI act like a trusted brand voice.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science at University of Maryland
Github Skills (200)
uploads10
state-machine10
paypal10
cheerio10
directives10
fonts10
audit10
dom10
font-awesome10
angularjs10
svg-font10
selector10
nodejs10
mongodb10
css10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
stephengardner/shopify-api-node-interface
Dec 2017 - May 2018
Contributions:28 commits, 2 PRs, 17 pushes in 5 months
apinode-modulejavascriptnode-apishopify-api
stephengardner/ag-floating-label
May 2016 - Oct 2016
Contributions:95 pushes, 2 branches, 21 tags in 5 months
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