Jesse Wheeler
Toronto, Canada

Jesse Wheeler

Engineering Lead

Engineering lead who's been an IC, principal, and manager. I build systems that hold up, grow the people around me, and make infrastructure work for the product instead of against it.

8+
Years in engineering
6
Engineers managed
Millions
Users served at Kijiji
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Experience

  1. ToursByLocals(opens in new tab)

    Vancouver / Toronto

    Engineering LeadJan 2025 - Present
    • -Own infrastructure, CI/CD, and frontend architecture across an 11-service Turborepo monorepo on EKS, managing 2 engineers
    • -Scoped and sequenced multi-month infrastructure changes across the platform, each delivered through phased rollouts
    • -Built the CI/CD and GitOps pipeline from scratch, deploying 11 services in ~17 minutes with 10-15 deploys per day

  2. Sabbatical & Contract Work

    Toronto / Quito, Ecuador

    Lead Software Engineer, PBP LawJun 2024 - Sep 2024
    SabbaticalAug 2023 - Jun 2024
    • -Took a sabbatical to travel, then built Pawsh as sole engineer: a two-sided pet services marketplace on Vertical Slice Architecture with a Turborepo monorepo (22 packages), NextAuth, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Cloudflare
    • -Contracted with PBP Law to build a secure document sharing platform. Flew to Quito to demo on live devices to firm leadership

  3. Kijiji Canada(opens in new tab)

    Toronto, Ontario

    Principal Frontend EngineerJun 2022 - Aug 2023
    • -Architected and led a staggered migration from a legacy Java frontend to Next.js serving millions of daily users. Both apps ran in parallel sharing authentication, analytics, and GTM state while traffic was shifted route-by-route and ramped gradually
    • -Restructured the frontend codebase to isolate team boundaries and reduce coupling, allowing multiple teams to ship independently
    • -Drove down P99 response latency by over 60% through infrastructure tuning and removing thread-blocking operations on the critical path

  4. HomeX(opens in new tab)

    Toronto, Ontario

    Senior Software Engineer IIAug 2021 - Jun 2022
    Senior Software Engineer IMar 2020 - Aug 2021
    Software EngineerDec 2019 - Mar 2020
    • -Promoted twice in under two years, from Software Engineer to Senior II. Managed a team of 6, with 3 juniors promoted to intermediate and 1 intermediate to senior during my tenure
    • -Built the shared component library using Atomic Design with accessibility and mobile-first baked in, adopted across all frontend teams
    • -Owned the frontend CI/CD pipeline, reducing build times by ~60% (28 min to 12 min) through sharding, concurrent workflows, and better caching

  5. Dreamschools(opens in new tab)

    Toronto, Ontario

    Lead Fullstack DeveloperJul 2019 - Dec 2019
    • -Took over a proof-of-concept and rebuilt it on a production-ready stack, setting up the architecture the product would run on
    • -Stood up CI/CD, deployment workflows, and developer tooling for a small team
    • -Built an automated payment system that replaced a fully manual invoicing process, removing a major source of errors and customer complaints

Education

George Brown College

Computer Programmer Analyst (T127)

2016 - 2019

Graduated with HonoursDean's List multiple semestersCitizenship AwardAcademic Excellence AwardLead Tutor & TA across 6 coursesSSHRC-funded research (Literacy Uplift)

Skills

Frontend

TypeScriptReactNext.jsReact NativeTailwind CSSstyled-components

Design Systems

Atomic DesignStorybookDesign TokensComponent Librariesreact-aria

Testing

JestReact Testing LibraryCypressPlaywright

Accessibility

WAI-ARIAWCAG 2.xKeyboard NavigationScreen Reader TestingFocus Management

Architecture

BFF PatternREST APIsGraphQLSSR / SSGMonorepo

Backend

Node.jsExpressPythonRedisMongoDBPostgreSQL

Infrastructure & DevOps

AWSGCPEKSDockerTerraformGitHub ActionsCircleCISpinnakerTurborepoDoppler

Observability

DatadogGrafanaPrometheusCloudWatch

Leadership

Team ManagementHiring & MentorshipArchitecture StrategyCI/CD Strategy

Projects

Ventures

Pawsh

Founder

A two-sided pet services marketplace built on Vertical Slice Architecture. Turborepo monorepo with 22 packages, NextAuth v5 with Redis sessions, Drizzle ORM, Cloudflare R2, and i18n.

Next.jsTypeScriptPostgreSQLRedisCloudflareTurborepoVercel
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Open Source

nvm-shield

npm package that validates Node.js versions against .nvmrc. Zero dependencies, works as a prestart hook or CI step.

TypeScriptNode.jsnpm
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circleci-pipeline-polling

GitHub Action that polls CircleCI pipelines and reports status back to GitHub checks with async polling and pagination.

JavaScriptGitHub ActionsCircleCI API
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Personal

GroupOSRS

RuneLite plugin and companion web app for Old School RuneScape group tracking.

JavaNext.jsPrismaGraphQLTypeScript
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W7JavaScript

A Windows 7 desktop clone I built in 2012 as my first portfolio. Interactive taskbar, draggable windows, file browser, and text editor in vanilla JS and jQuery.

JavaScriptjQueryPHPCSS
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Now

  • BuildingPawsh, a two-sided pet services marketplace
  • ReadingStaff Engineer by Will Larson
  • Focused onScaling CI/CD and frontend architecture at ToursByLocals

Community

Hack Lassonde

Hack Lassonde

Spoke and ran a workshop at York University's #HackLassonde on building APIs with MongoDB, Express, and Node.

Cisco Hackathon

Built a Webex Teams chatbot that uses a machine learning model to score GitHub repository health on a scale of 0-100.

HackerNest Toronto

Attended HackerNest Toronto tech socials as a regular, meeting developers across the city's startup scene.

Elementary School Career Pathways

Elementary School Career Pathways

Spoke at a local elementary school about careers in programming and what a day in software engineering looks like.