Amanda Li
Amanda Li
Teamwork makes the Dream work!

Director of Engineering

AmANDA
Li-GARFIN

picture credit: James Ransom

ABOUT

New yOrk, NY

Proven leader in software development with 14+ years of hands-on technical experience. Build and manage high performing teams of software professionals. Expertise in building consumer-facing mobile apps used by tens of millions, enterprise risk and user investigation tools and providing reliable and scalable platform services. Passionate about solving challenging technical problems that make an impact and help others. Past work includes FinTech, eCommerce startups, investment banking, and government.

 

Experience

Venmo, Director of ENgineEring of Core Experiences

December 2021 - Present

Increased responsibilities by merging her Common Platforms Pillar with the Growth & P2P Pillar. Became Co-Lead of the new Core Experiences Pillar, which added ownership of P2P, engagement, social graph, and Crypto, growing total org size to 108.

  • Leading complex technical integrations across domains and PayPal teams to modernize platform capabilities and architecture across Venmo and PayPal

  • Spearheaded brand new Marketing & Experimentation team of 8 to power Marketing campaigns in the Venmo mobile and web applications and support dynamic proliferation of features

Venmo, Principal SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Manager OF COMMON PLATFORMS

February 2021 - December 2021

Increased responsibilities by taking over as Common Platforms Pillar Lead, which owns core user flows such as login, onboarding, identity verification, and settings. Conducted re-org to address at-risk roadmap deliverables and ameliorate staffing and skill gaps.

  • Served as executive sponsor for Native App Modularization work to break up the iOS and Android native app monoliths into discrete modules. Worked with the Client Core EM to set goals and milestones and drive team efficiencies.

  • Enabled Payments and Instant Transfers on Venmo.com, growing P2P TPV on Web over 220% and adding new revenue stream.

  • Identified and elevated key talent into new positions of leadership to accelerate and foster growth

Venmo, SENIOR STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Manager of Internal TOOLS, WEB, R&D, and Experience Foundations

March 2020 - February 2021

Increased responsibilities by spearheading a brand new Research and Development team of 10. Acquired Experience Foundations Team responsible for building mobile platforms, thus increasing total org size to 31.

  • Managing an R&D team of 10 to build a React Native prototype of the Venmo apps. Built a proof of concept in just 2 weeks, acquired Venmo Senior Leadership Team approval, and working on a fully-featured Prototype to be delivered in early 2021.

  • In November 2020, led the Web team in launching a complete redesign of https://venmo.com/ utilizing Typescript, React, NextJS, Storybook, Optimizely. Project took 4 months.

  • Led a team of 4 in building an Orchestration Layer prototype written in Typescript and GraphQL, the first within Venmo. Within a quarter, and in parallel with the React Native prototype, delivered a solid, fully tested Orchestration Layer live to production. As of Jan 2022, the Orchestration Layer is the primary integration for all Venmo.com user experiences.

Venmo, Engineering Manager of Internal TOOLS AND WEB

March 2019 - March 2020

Moved off the Platform as a Service team to spearhead a new Web Engineering team to revamp all Venmo.com and mobile web experiences.

  • Hired and managing a team of 10 to address foundational Web platform issues including moving off of legacy AWS codedeploy and into standardized coding pipeline, containerizing Web applications and moving them onto Kubernetes, sunsetting legacy Django/Python/Backbone web application and migrating into NodeJS/Express/React/Redux

  • Building out a product and engineering roadmap to support rapid experimentation, standardize frontend technologies, and decompose monolithic web app into smaller standalone web apps

  • Grew the Internal Tools team 3x, from 4 engineers to 11 engineers plus 1 engineering manager

VENMO, ENGINEERING MANAGER OF INTERNAL TOOLS AND PLATFORM AS A SERVICE

June 2018 - March 2019

Increased responsibilities by additionally becoming the Engineering Manager of the Internal Tools team, and also the Engineering Manager of the Platform as a Service team. Led the Platform as a Service team of 10 to move platform architecture towards a distributed, event-driven processing paradigm and reduce reliance on asynchronous processing infrastructure to improve resiliency and performance.

  • Worked with Infrastructure as a Service team to containerize “Scope” application as a pilot for moving onto Kubernetes orchestration platform using Docker, Artifactory, Envoy, Helm, and Kibana. Pilot was successful and provided auto-scaling, zero-downtime deploys, and reduced deploy times by 5x

VENMO, TECH LEAD OF INTERNAL TOOLS

October 2013 - June 2018

Architected and led a team of 7 in building a secure and scalable Python/Django/React.js web application for fraud and user investigations called “Scope”. Championed a responsible test-driven culture and improved test coverage for a business-critical application by 10x, reducing application outages and improving internal SLAs from 1 day to 30 mins.

  • Wrote REST-ful API endpoints in Python for core platform libraries used by internal and external API consumers

  • Built and maintained an internal Risk Engine that evaluates nearly every Venmo transaction. Worked quickly to adapt to new fraud patterns and develop new variables to catch and prevent fraud, saving Venmo millions of dollars.

  • Implemented Single Sign On authentication for “Scope” application using SAML 2.0

  • Interviewed, mentored and trained employees on Python best practices and participated in hundreds of code reviews, pairing, and whiteboarding to share knowledge and promote a collegial coding culture.

FOOD52, SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER

December 2011 - August 2013

Design and develop a Ruby on Rails / Knockout.js web application for a crowd-sourced recipe site with real-time cooking hotline and online retail store. Work with business and technology leads to formulate business requirements, run feasibility studies, use test-driven development, conduct user acceptance testing, and deploy code releases to QA and Production environments

  • Designed and developed a Ruby on Rails / Knockout.js web application for a crowd-sourced food site with realtime cooking hotline and online retail store.

  • Tripled productivity by transitioning existing machine infrastructure from Amazon EC2 server environment to EngineYard, involving systems administrator duties, software patching, front-to-back testing, and documenting new deployment procedures via internal github wiki. Developed and installed Chef cookbooks to automate server tasks and eliminate manual touch

  • Integrated credit card payments and sales tax calculations for online retail store using third party APIs including Braintree Payments and Avalara

UBS Investment Bank, Mortgage Analytics Developer

July 2008 - December 2011

Worked on firm’s global risk and valuation tool for fixed income securities including mortgage-backed securities, government and corporate bonds, derivatives, etc. Assisted with the execution and delivery of fixed income deliverables and apply software or process improvement methodologies.

  • Worked on a multi-tiered global risk and valuation application for mortgage-backed securities, credit derivatives, whole loans, and other fixed income securities, architected with a Windows .NET /C# GUI front-end, C++ calculation and valuation, TIBCO communication layer, and Sybase database

  • Collaborated with trading desks, control groups, and technologists globally to resolve support issues such as profit and loss report generation and portfolio risk calculations, requiring in-depth knowledge of Intex, Bloomberg, downstream trade capture and market risk control processes, and pricing algorithms for fixed-income securities.

  • Built and maintained in-house .NET WCF services to allow clients real-time access to fixed-income securities valuations, instruments, and prices as part of a system-wide migration to service-oriented architecture.

Average Day

Languages

Experience

 

InterestS

Traveling
Puzzle games
Dragonboating
Coffee in all forms
Team sports
Lists

Education

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, COrnell University, New york

B.S. INFORMATION SCIENCE, SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY
Graduated May 2008

 

FRENCH CULINARY INSTITUTE, NEW YORK

GRADUATE, PROFESSIONAL CULINARY ARTS
Graduated June 2012

 

Awards

2017 US NATIONAL TEAM PREMIER WOMENs Dragonboat

GOLD, SILVER, AND BRonze medalist

2015 US NATIONAL TEAM PREMIER WOMENS DRAGONBOAT

GOLD AND SILVER MEDALIST

Contact

Email: AMANDA.j.Li@GMAIL.com
Address: FOREST HILLS, NY