Hi there, I’m Tatsuya 👋

Tatsuya Oiwa is a software developer living and working (from home) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He works in the Discovery Experiences team at Shopify, where he helps merchants sell by showing buyers the most relevant products. His current focus is on building and launching a new first-party Shopify app, Shopify Search and Discovery, which enables merchants to increase conversions with customizable search, filtering, and product recommendations. This work includes developing the Ruby on Rails backend of the app, contributing to Shopify APIs and SDKs, and maintaining Shopify's core platform.

Prior to coming to Toronto, Tatsuya lived in New York for about two years. He worked at Quartz, a global digital business news publisher, where he designed and developed the backend systems that drive Quartz’s paid subscription and email services. He helped build and grow the product, serving more than 25,000 paying members globally. He was also one of the first engineering hires at NewsPicks USA, the US branch of Japan’s leading business news platform, which was later acquired by and rebranded as Quartz.

Starting his career in Tokyo, Tatsuya worked for both large and small e-commerce companies. Those include Rakuten, Japan’s largest e-commerce platform, and Gilt, a luxury apparel flash sale site. There he was involved in and learned all stages of the software development lifecycle from design and development to release and maintenance. He worked on numerous products and projects, including self-service deployment and monitoring of a large scale distributed search platform, internal frontend tools to measure and experiment with search relevance and ranking algorithms, performance analysis and tuning of backend servers under high volume traffic, providing personalized shopping experiences drives growth and engagement, and refactoring and data migration of legacy applications and storage systems.

With his extensive work experience in diverse environments, he specializes in solving problems in a way that minimizes risk and maximizes value. He turns problems over and over in his mind until he finds an elegant solution that seemed impossible from the outset. He values generosity and empathy, and is always willing to set aside his own work to help others who are struggling. He brings enthusiasm to everything he does with his incessant intellectual curiosity.

Born and raised in a small waterfront town in Aichi, Japan, he moved across the Pacific Ocean to where he is today. His next life goal is to live on and work from as many continents and islands as possible.

You can also find me on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn. Here’s my resume.