Oliver Griffiths

Etsy · Staff Software Engineer

September 2025 – Present · International Trust & Awareness, and Orders Seller Experience teams

• Lead technical direction for two teams, owning architecture for the translation infrastructure, seller order administration and the authentication framework.
• Built a new authentication layer for the Shop Employee Login project, letting sellers give staff their own logins to a shop.
• Use AI coding tools (Claude, Codex, Gemini, ChatGPT) daily for implementation, refactoring, test generation and code review, and help the team adopt them in its workflow.
• Mentor junior engineers through design reviews, pairing and code review.

Tumblr

Senior Principal Engineer · September 2019 – April 2025

• Set technical strategy for Tumblr's highest-priority cross-team initiatives, gathering requirements from product, design, legal and engineering.
• Designed and built the GDPR data download system, letting users export all of their account data. Involving online and offline data collection.
• Built the AI training data export pipeline for licensing partners, respecting each user's privacy and opt-out settings.
• Technical lead on Communities, the largest new feature in the platform's history. Responsible for collecting product requirements and designing the implementation plan within the existing technical framework.
• Built a new deployment front end in Node.js, TypeScript and React, and moved the Gearman job system onto Kubernetes.

Principal Engineer · March 2018 – September 2019

• Designed and built a media registry database tracking over a billion image, audio and video assets across the platform, giving Trust & Safety one place to find and remove content that violated guidelines.
• Worked with engineers, product managers, and designers across teams to advise and implement solutions for new product features.

Staff Engineer · March 2016 – March 2018

• Introduced a company-wide RFC process for new features, so stakeholders reviewed designs before build began.
• Advised on architecture for company-wide initiatives, drawing on knowledge of the whole platform.

Senior Engineer, Core PHP · April 2015 – March 2016

• Rebuilt the controller and view architecture and the application bootstrap and configuration, giving product engineers a more stable and testable base.
• Introduced the codebase's first unit test suite, code coverage reporting and CI pipeline.
• Automated code linting, which cut style discussion out of pull request reviews.

Expand The Room · Head of Mobile and Senior Engineer

February 2013 – April 2015 · New York

• Built the front end and back end of a digital watermarking system for ESPN Radio that detected inaudible watermarks in broadcast commercials.
• Promoted to Head of Mobile in June 2013. Built an iPad app for AIG showing real-time security threat data from AIG's JSON feeds.
• Built a JavaScript mobile web app delivering phone and tablet versions of a client's existing websites, and delivered full-stack builds for clients including Rolling Stone.

The Organic Agency · CTO

February 2007 – January 2013 · UK

• Joined a six-month-old digital marketing agency and became technical lead within three months; grew and managed the development team and set the technology roadmap.
• Spearheaded the web development arm of the business, designing turnkey web hosting installs using the Joomla content management system.
• Delivered projects for clients including Microsoft and the NHS, from iPhone games to email marketing systems.
• Introduced agile delivery, Git version control and automated deployments.