Welcome

Work Experience: Great Big Canvas

I was a founding engineer on the ecommerce platform behind Great Big Canvasopens in a new tab, a direct-to-consumer print-on-demand wall art business. Over 15 years, I helped build and operate the system end-to-end, scaling it to support over a million monthly users and an eight-figure business, with zero downtime during peak seasons.

I led the architecture and development of the platform, which includes large-scale catalog management, real-time product rendering and preview systems, automated production routing, and a custom CMS used by internal teams to manage content and merchandising.

screenshot of greatbigcanvas.com's desktop home page
Great Big Canvas (desktop)
screenshot of greatbigcanvas.com's mobile home page
Great Big Canvas (mobile)

Key Contribution Summary

  • Architected and built the core ecommerce platform, including database, web application, and workflow automation systems
  • Maintained zero peak-season downtime across 15 consecutive years of operation
  • Built a hybrid image rendering platform that served default product imagery from pre-rendered S3 assets while routing customized and room-preview requests through a real-time rendering engine, allowing millions of fast catalog impressions while containing CPU-intensive work to high-value scenarios
  • Built the catalog ranking system that powers the product discovery experience
  • Built a modular CMS enabling non-engineering teams to manage layouts, merchandising, and content strategy
  • Built internal platforms and tooling that enabled non-engineering teams to control merchandising, content strategy, and ranking behavior without code changes
  • Led the cloud rearchitecture and migration to AWS
  • Scaled the platform to support 10x traffic growth without architectural rewrites
  • Partnered with executive leadership on product strategy, merchandising systems, and platform direction
  • C#, ASP.NET, Vue.js, SQL Server, Entity Framework, IIS, AWS

Platform / DevOps

As an 8-figure site with over a million monthly users, things that were niceties in the early days became table stakes as we scaled.

  • Full platform observability with AWS CloudWatch dashboards, custom metrics, and logging
  • Geographic redundancy for each part of the stack
  • Active security posture with AWS WAF/Shield, real-time monitoring, and behavior analysis
  • Automated instance bootstrapping and fleet scaling tools
  • Automated deployments using custom in-house tooling for ALB management, deployment orchestration, and verification with failsafes

Highlight: Product Scoring Algo System

As the catalog and user base grew, we needed a more advanced solution to our simple product scoring system that powered the main ranking of non-search product listing pages (PLPs).

To address this, I proposed, designed, and built a custom multi-algo scoring system.

Results

  • Better add-to-cart and conversion rates
  • Less manual merchandising effort due to better automatic response to seasonal content changes
  • Improved relationships with vendors due to more visibility for new/trending content
  • Reduced time to market with zero code deployment for updates to the algo behavior

Key Features

  • User-customizable multi-step calculation engine using rule-based logic and formula evaluation to compute a global score for each product
  • Time-windowed user behavior metrics such as views, add-to-cart events, purchases, and A2C/purchase ratios (with customizable recency scaling) are available as formula inputs and rule dimensions
  • Manages up to four pre-calculated scores per product that can be tested against each other in full-stack A/B tests
  • Built-in version management with draft and live configurations per algo
  • Live real-time testing before final batch offline calculation
  • Updated daily to take trending content and seasonal behavior into account

Highlight: Custom On-Site CMS

During our front-end modernization project in 2021, I added a fully modular, front-end-managed CMS that became the foundation we used to relaunch our content strategy.

In the years following, I added customization capability to the entire system by building a behavior-based user segmentation system that fed into the CMS down to the component level.

Results

  • Better site content engagement stats
  • Lower bounce rates on key landing pages
  • Faster time to market for new content strategies
  • Vastly improved content strategy by putting powerful tools into the hands of the content and design team

Key Features

  • Multi-level structure: page-, layout-, and component-level management
  • Rule-engine based selection of full layouts for each page based on user segmentation/membership
  • User-friendly sidebar with content customization options built in using modern UX practices
  • Blazing-fast performance with multi-layer caching strategy

Contact Me Back to Work / Resume

Great Big Canvas® is a registered trademark of Circle Graphics, Inc. All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. References are used solely to describe my professional experience and do not imply affiliation or endorsement.