Andrew “Drew” Hays
- Pronouns:
- he/him
Experience
- The Walt Disney CompanySeattle, WA
- Senior Principal EngineerJune 2024 – Present
I am currently the lead architect focused on the infrastructure and architecture for our Growth, Commerce, and Identity Experience teams where we build identity flows across all of The Walt Disney Company. We also create commerce flows across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN apps.
I work across all parts of our flows, starting with our marketing-focused app that serves both landing pages and browsable content. I also helped create a new multi-tenant commerce application that we deploy across Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN. We create several libraries that we build into the browse and playback experience for commerce messaging and authentication. And we power most of this through a “backend-for-frontend” service that we built for simplifying our commerce flows.
I also work with our platform team to scale our infrastructure to create seamless CI/CD workflows for our teams. We have worked on projects like blue/green deployment systems, mesh networking, and better testing pipelines that we scale to all of our applications and services.
- StripeSeattle, WA
- Staff EngineerJanuary 2022 – June 2024
I was the tech lead of a team at Stripe known as “Platform Abstractions”. This team owned the bootstrapping experience for Connect Platforms, creating and managing all of their connected accounts—such as Xero users, the drivers for Lyft, or merchants on Squarespace and Shopify.
I was also the tech lead for Stripe’s Account UX Infrastructure team, where we focused on creating the authentication and authorization processes for connected accounts at Stripe. The team provided a balance between security and low friction for the users that come to Stripe through another platform (such as DoorDash restaurants, Shopify stores, and GitHub Sponsors).
As the tech lead, I was both responsible for some of my own projects and a mentor to other members of my team—helping them drive their own projects. While I was there, I worked with developers on my team to build a new “Account Claim” flow, allowing merchants to onboard to Stripe and securely manage their bank accounts.
One of my core technical focuses was unifying our authentication flows into a single process, and then extending that flow to be embedded in third party websites. This allowed merchants on a platform to securely interact with Stripe models through their platform's website.
- Hulu, LLCSeattle, WA
- Principal Software Developer, ArchitectMarch 2019 – January 2022
- Senior Software DeveloperMarch 2016 – March 2019
- Software DeveloperNovember 2014 – March 2016
From August 2020 to January 2022, I led a team of developers focused on unifying the development experience for the web organization. The team focused on building common tools, platforms, and libraries to simplify the development needs on other teams. Projects include libraries like a unified design system built with React components, tools for simplifying the release process, and migrating all of our core services to a Kubernetes ecosystem. This team also improved and simplified Web’s core infrastructure, including our CDN layer, nginx-based routing system, and services like a dynamic configuration service.
I also used my role as architect to mentor developers across the organization. I spent time diving in and understanding Hulu’s tech stack and teaching others how it works as well. We covered a wider variety of web fundamentals, including HTTP requests, cookies, caches (both CDN and browser), network requests, and more. Finally, I helped create a forum for developers to regularly meet and discuss interesting things in the tech space. The group welcomed members from across the company to find topics that are interesting to them and host discussions.
I was also the technical lead for many cross-company projects at Hulu. I helped lead the initiative for unifying Hulu and Disney Streaming’s Web tech stacks. I worked on cross-client initiatives such as coordinating the development of Hulu’s Live Guide feature, from the design of the API to the client architecture across Android, iOS, Web, tvOS, Roku, and Hulu’s browser-based devices.
- AmazonSeattle, WA
- Software Development EngineerJune 2012 – November 2014
I worked as a software developer on Amazon’s Marketplace services for third-party sellers, focusing on services and experiences around managing a merchant’s active orders and returns, as well as integrating with third-party shipping companies to provide integrated shipping labels directly in the merchant portal. The position focused primarily on building Java services and a Perl-based frontend infrastructure.
I designed and led several initiatives for Amazon Marketplace. I built a service and seller-facing API that would allow merchants to process returns in bulk. I also worked on several compliance features including enforcing KYC policies and GDPR for European merchants.
- MolexLittle Rock, AR
- Software Developer, InternSeptember 2010 – May 2011
I developed software to test cables, wrote APIs and drivers for other engineers to write their own software for test machines, and developed a partitioned global database that synchronizes serial numbers and test information across multiple facilities using the .NET framework.
Education
- University of Arkansas at Little RockLittle Rock, AR
- Mathematics, B.S.August 2008 – May 2012
- Computer Science, B.S.August 2008 – May 2012