Whitney Mak
Engineering Manager
Engineering Leadership & Team Building, Web & Mobile Development
Professional Summary
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- Engineering leader with 15 years of working experience driving technical innovation and product development in the spaces of merchant e-commerce for social platforms, and building mobile games played by millions around the world
- Experienced in people hiring and career management to create performant teams that work effectively in meeting defined goals, while having successfully promoted 80% of my engineering reports
- Proficient in prioritizing multiple tasks, onboarding quickly into new tech stacks, and developing technical strategies with data analysis on experimental impact in live production environments
- Regular advocate for diversity and community building 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 objectives via the development of leading and lagging KPIs, as well as forming 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 L6Pinterest, Toronto, Canada, Sept 2021 – Present
- Supported multiple engineering team building and restructuring iniatives, including hiring 7 new headcount within a year across various locations, while forming new teams and strategies to align quickly with priority shifts over the years
- Managed technical projects in the shopping and merchants e-commerce space, by leading features that grew merchant onboarding actions by 5% and increased content availability of shopping products on the platform by millions
- Worked closely with engineering, product, data, and design partners across organizations to architect complex systems for conducting merchant quality reviews on hundreds of revenue generating retailers daily, while balancing the needs of trust and safety platform policies
- Explored the application of machine learning signals in automating and deriving outcomes that would reduce existing manual processing by 50% via the generation of merchant quality thresholds using labeling data
- Created data-driven development tactics to measure experimental impact, using it to come up with team strategies that ladder to business goals with projects that increased merchant revenue generation by $900k
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Engineering ManagerZynga, Toronto, Canada, July 2018 – Aug 2021
- Promoted from IC into a management role for my Toronto engineering team on Words With Friends, and led transitioning native iOS / Android client technologies into React Native platforms
- Devised a rotational internship program for onboarding and hiring engineering interns for the team every quarter, working closely with other managers and recruitment teams
- Improved technical processes and tools maintenance in our agile development and game release cycles, by forming clear working guidelines between engineers and project managers
- Developed experience with mediating discussions between tech and other disciplines over priorities, diversity hiring guidance, and career growth conversations via leveling up several of my reports over the years
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Software EngineerZynga, Toronto, Canada, June 2012 – July 2018
- Started as a full-time engineer after graduation and worked up to a senior engineer position across 5 different internal services and games teams with different coding platforms and tech stacks
- Programming experience focused on frontend development, especially with iOS (Objective-C), but also worked in Android (Java), React Native (Typescript), Web (Javascript), and scripting for tooling
- Implemented client-server APIs (with a Ruby on Rails backend team), handling networking calls architecture, graphical animations, and performance management and monitoring in mobile gaming
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Software Engineer Internships
- Developed iPad features for a secure document viewing software startup – ionGrid (Acquired), Sept – Dec 2011
- Prototyped mobile and web features using new technologies for BlackBerry – Research In Motion, Sept – Dec 2010
- Learned Objective-C and helped build a mobile fashion game – XMG Studio (Acquired), Jan – Apr 2010
- Built interactive flash apps and email automation scripts – IBM Canada, Sept 2008 – Aug 2009
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