Steven Birk
Technical Director at Wattpad
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSteven Birk is a technology-agnostic Technical Director with 15 years of experience designing and building high-performance backend systems, APIs, and reliability tooling. Currently leading Platforms at Wattpad, he combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership—moving from staff engineer to technical director in 2024—to drive architecture, system reliability, and performance at scale. His background spans finance-grade trading platforms at OANDA to product-focused startups like Taplytics, with deep proficiency in Python, JavaScript and modern C++ (C++11+). Steven is comfortable owning projects end-to-end, from technical specification through implementation and mentorship, and has a track record of rebuilding core libraries and performance test infrastructures. He holds an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto and a BS in Mathematics and Engineering from Queen’s, pairing formal rigor with practical, production-driven solutions.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at University of TorontoBachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics and Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics and Engineering at Queen's UniversityProgramming languages (1)
Github contributions (3)
stevebirk/eventlog
Feb 2015 - Mar 2021
Contributions:37 commits, 27 pushes, 3 branches in 6 years 2 months
taplytics/kafka-node
May 2019 - Jun 2019
Node.js client for Apache Kafka 0.8 and later.
Contributions:6 PRs, 5 pushes, 2 branches in 4 days
js-clientapache-kafkakafka-streamsnode-jsjavascript
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