Whitney Mak
Engineering Manager
Engineering Leadership & Team Building, Web & Mobile Development
Professional Summary
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- Engineering leader with 15 years of experience driving technical product innovation and development, with added expertise in the e-commerce space for social platforms, as well as building large scale mobile games
- Veteran in people hiring and performance management to build high output teams that work collaboratively in reaching defined goals, while having successfully promoted 80% of engineering reports
- Proficient in creating and presenting business strategies via data analysis on experimental impact in live production environments, prioritizing multiple projects resourcing, and improving processes for continuous release cycles
- Advocate for diversity and community outreach through 1:1 mentorship sessions and participation in public speaking panels for tech events with over 50+ industry professionals and students in attendance
- Seeking opportunities to expand into the following areas of interest: AI innovations in gaming and automobile industries, healthcare systems, robotics and animatronics
Skills
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Teamwork & Management
- Prioritizes roadmap strategies with cross functional partners to align project resourcing to yearly business goals via the formation of leading and lagging KPIs, OKRs, and data-driven development team practices
- Manages high performing engineering teams with upwards of 10 direct reports from junior to staff levels, focused on quality coding practices and technical knowledge sharing
- Veteran at hiring and onboarding happy tech teams across time zones both remotely and in-person, using structured responsive processes for technical product development and distributed systems monitoring
- Strong collaboration and brainstorming techniques with cross-organizational teams to build scalable products in iterative deliverables to maximize impact
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Technical
- Languages: Python, Java, JavaScript, C#(Unity), Objective-C, SQL
- Tools: Visual Studio, XCode, Jupyter, Git, JIRA, Figma, Miro, Pagerduty, Bugsnag
Work Experience
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Engineering Manager L6 – Shopping & MerchantsPinterest, Toronto, Canada, Sept 2021 – Nov 2025
- Worked closely with engineering, product, data, and design partners across organizations to architect end to end systems for conducting daily merchant quality reviews on thousands of revenue generating retailers, while balancing the needs of trust and safety platform policies
- Experimented with data labeling for training and development of machine learning signals to automate detection of violating merchants and products, resulting in the reduction of manual review processing time and inaccuracies
- Managed technical projects in the shopping and merchants e-commerce space, by shipping features that grew merchant onboarding actions by 5% and increased content availability of shopping products on the platform globally
- Created data-driven development and release processes, which were used to analyze metrics in influencing new strategic projects that helped improve merchant approval rates by 25% to assist with revenue generation goals
- Drove multiple engineering team building and restructuring initiatives, including hiring 7 new headcounts within a year across various locations, and designing teams and strategies to align quickly with priority shifts
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Engineering Manager – Casual Gaming DivisionZynga, Toronto, Canada, July 2018 – Aug 2021
- Promoted into management for the Toronto engineering team on Words With Friends, and led the team to rewrite features from the native client apps into a new shared React Native platform app
- Devised a rotational internship program for onboarding and hiring engineering interns for the team every quarter, working closely with other managers and recruitment teams
- Exercised leadership experiences over mediating prioritization discussions between tech and other disciplines, providing diversity hiring guidance to teams, and developing career growth conversation plans
- Transitioned to the Unity tech stack by coding multiple user-facing features for the Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells game launches
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Software Engineer – Casual Gaming DivisionZynga, Toronto, Canada, June 2012 – July 2018
- Worked up to a senior engineer position across 5 different internal services and games teams with multiple coding platforms and tech stacks across web and mobile
- Programming experience focused on frontend development with iOS (Objective-C), Android (Java), React Native (Typescript), Web (Javascript), and scripting for internal tooling (Python)
- Implemented client-server APIs alongside a Ruby on Rails backend team, and handled building out networking architectures
- Honed skills in building front-end logic for smooth graphical animations, performance resource management, and service monitoring capabilities in mobile gaming development platforms
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Software Engineer Internships
- ionGrid, Sept – Dec 2011: Developed iPad features for a secure document viewing software startup
- Research In Motion, Sept – Dec 2010: Prototyped mobile and web features integrating third party technologies for BlackBerry devices
- XMG Studio, Jan – Apr 2010: Learned Objective-C and built fashion game features
- IBM Canada, Sept 2008 – Aug 2009: Built interactive Flash apps and email automation scripts
Education
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Data Science & Machine Learning CertificateData Sciences Institute at University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, Nov 2024 – Apr 2025
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User Experience Design CourseBitmaker Labs (now General Assembly), Toronto, Canada, May – July 2015
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Bachelor of Applied Science – Computer Engineering with Management Science OptionUniversity of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada, Sept 2007 – June 2012