Runtime Engineering Lead at Parity Technologies, where he has spent over eight years building blockchain infrastructure for the decentralized web, working across Rust, Substrate, Polkadot, and Ethereum. Shawn also serves as an Architect on the Polkadot Fellowship and as a lead instructor with the Polkadot Blockchain Academy.
Before moving into blockchain, Shawn spent four years at Microsoft as a Program Manager, where he led design and development of Microsoft’s OAuth 2.0 application model, unifying Microsoft Accounts and Azure AD identities across the company’s internal and public platforms. He also built an internal framework that sped up onboarding for new Azure services and worked on Azure Service Health, providing guidance and support during live site incidents.
Shawn’s path into programming started at 13, hacking his PlayStation Portable through the PSP homebrew community. He went on to study physics and mathematics at UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies, where his undergraduate research developed particle-tracking software that outperformed traditional CPU implementations by 500x, published in AIP’s Review of Scientific Instruments.
