The collected experience · Vol. 01
Cameron Nickert.
Senior Software Engineer · Payments, platforms, and merchant trust.
I build money-critical software for small businesses. My work spans payments, identity, and commerce systems, with an emphasis on reliability, performance, observability, and safe delivery across product and infrastructure teams.
Capabilities
EngineeringRuby on Rails · Java · Spring Boot · React · TypeScript · Node.js
SystemsDistributed systems · API design · SQL · Kafka · Performance · Observability
Cloud & commerceGCP · Cloud Run · AWS Lambda · DynamoDB · Stripe · Payments
Education
M.S., Software EngineeringUniversity of Michigan–Dearborn · 2019–2021
B.S., Computer ScienceCentral Michigan University · IT and Mathematics minors · 2014–2018
FIRST Robotics mentor · Returned to my hometown school to teach wiring and programming, 2015–2016.
Experience
Senior Software Engineer
Payments Platform
- Own payment platform work across architecture, implementation, rollout, performance, and production readiness.
- Led unified third-party refunds into Shopify’s processing flow, including retry and error-handling parity and a full-traffic rollout.
- Expanded Payments API orchestration for asynchronous redeemables and multiple charges in one payment.
- Resolved migration performance bottlenecks in checkout paths and helped prepare systems for peak events through load validation and game days.
Software Engineer II
Identity Platform
- Maintained authentication and account services used by job seekers and employers.
- Contributed to secure identity flows across Java, Spring Boot, React, and TypeScript.
Software Engineering Team Lead
Payments + Web Experiences
- Led an embedded payment library for secure reservations and digital purchases across Ford web properties.
- Led a support portal that let teams diagnose payment failures without direct database or log access.
Selected projects
Shopify Payments: Card-Present Gateway
2026Helped build and productionize Shopify's own card-present payment gateway, creating a foundation for provider-agnostic in-person payments.
- Separated payment creation, continuation, and result mapping into clearer orchestration workflows.
- Refactored provider integrations into dedicated request clients and simplified card-present payload construction and result handling.
Unified Refund API
2024 - 2025Built foundations and led rollout of unified Refund API support to third-party payment providers.
- Brought third-party refunds into the unified processing flow with parity for retries and error handling.
- Shipped operational monitoring and reliability safeguards for high-traffic events.
Redesign Payments API for Third-Party Gift Card Support
2023 - 2024Delivered model foundations and expanded orchestration to support asynchronous redeemables (e.g., third-party gift cards) with multiple charges in one payment.
- Enabled split-payment patterns needed for third-party gift card support.
- Helped evolve orchestration so payment attempts became a stronger source of truth.
Optimize Payments Platform Performance for Migrations
2025Restored throughput parity during concurrent payment migrations in critical checkout paths.
- Worked on performance bottlenecks that caused elevated error rates under migration load.
- Helped recover near-baseline throughput for both third-party and first-party migration tracks.
Ford Payment Library
2019 - 2021Led an embedded payment library used in secure Ford web payment experiences.
- Created reusable secure payment capabilities for multiple Ford properties.
- Supported reservations and digital purchase flows in consumer experiences.
Ford Pay Troubleshooting Portal
2020 - 2021Led development of a support tool that reduced manual troubleshooting for payment journeys.
- Enabled business teams to inspect payment journey failures without direct log/database access.
- Improved support speed and confidence with purpose-built diagnostics.
Web Appetizer
2020 - 2022Built a serverless SaaS ordering platform for restaurants with payment and POS-style workflows.
- Created customer-facing menu customization and ordering experiences.
- Built a POS-style interface for receiving and managing new orders.
Ventures
Staffed AI Services
2025 - PresentBuilt staffing and automation services with web-focused, cloud-native deployments.
Web Appetizer
2020 - 2022Built a serverless SaaS ordering platform for restaurants with payment and POS-style workflows.
Lambda Eats SaaS (Master's Project)
2021Built a serverless online ordering SaaS platform as a graduate capstone project.