Dirk Gadsden

I do software engineering in San Francisco:
I improve teams through mentoring, architecting systems, reviewing code, writing code, and all the other everyday bits of engineering leadership.

Outside of work I enjoy long runs, cooking, and listening to many, many episodes of bad movie podcasts.

Check out my blog. ↦

Social

Blog
(PGP)
GitHub
Twitter
LinkedIn
Instagram

Work

  • Coinbase

    2025-Present

    Staff engineer on risk.

  • Etsy

    2019-2025

    Staff engineer on web platform; developed a generational leap forward in the web framework to introduce async/await and componentized rendering; rearchitected the translation services and integrations to improve velocity and reduce incidents by 80%.

  • Brandless

    2017–2019

    Technical lead & first engineer; responsible for application architecture, mentoring engineers, and technical direction of e-commerce site.

  • Everlane

    2015–2017

    Built back-end systems and front-end experiences for e-commerce platform. Optimized performance through Ruby VM profiling and application tracing. Improved global performance by maturing system topology.

  • TallyVoting

    2015

    Technical co-founder of a now-defunct voting technology start-up.

  • Fetchnotes

    2014

    Built new back-end (Node.js) for personal note-taking start-up. Implemented JavaScript & Objective-C client libraries to support other teams.

  • Fuzzco

    2009-2012

    Turned designs into code and built event management & payment processing systems for client sites.