Employee Spotlight: George FitzGibbons
Welcome to the BigCommerce Employee Spotlight. Each month, we’ll chat with an employee who works on the BigCommerce product. These are the folks behind the scenes who are crafting the BigCommerce developer experience, from SDKs and APIs to themes and documentation. Discover what they’re building, their tools of the trade, and learn about the technologies they’re passionate about.
Hi George, Tell me about your path to BigCommerce.
Right after college, I accepted my first role in tech in an advertising operations role. While there, I started becoming really interested in how things on the internet worked and focused my time being creative, learning, and figuring out what I could.
A couple of years later, I had the opportunity to work at Runkeeper in a Software Engineer role. During my time at Runkeeper, we began to work on commerce projects for ASICS, specifically around personalization and data. I loved working in ecommerce, but didn’t understand why I wasn’t able to simply use an API to fetch products and drive transactions.
Next, I started getting more hands-on building mobile apps and tracking tools. I took a job at a mobile app company, Moltin, as an engineer. That was an amazing experience. I was able to work with extremely talented engineers that taught me so much. After a couple of years, I started to miss talking about the business side of ecommerce and found I could do both when I learned about an opportunity at BigCommerce. I found that BigCommerce was able to enable businesses with turn-key solutions and APIs. It seemed like the best of both worlds and I was lucky enough to get a job here and I haven’t looked back.
Do you have a formal education in software engineering or are you self-taught?
I actually went to school for Forestry and did not have that much formal education in sales or software engineering. That being said, studying the forest helps me think about complex systems and how they interact. I find the majority of engineering aspects of my job are thinking about how our commerce system interacts with a broader ecosystem.
Tell me more about your team. What are you working on?
I work on the sales engineering team! We’ve got an amazing team that is always working on cool projects and seeking out interesting use cases. We are on the front line to help prospects accomplish business goals using BigCommerce, which is interesting to me as I love hearing what people are working on and how they are building the future of commerce.
The most interesting project I am working on revolves around enabling our prospects to understand how BigCommerce technology can enable their business. I think the most interesting ones are using Next.js and serverless functions.
I love seeing how prospects are using our app infrastructure to build private apps to create custom views in our dashboard. This is a great way we are enabling Open SaaS to our admin dashboard. You get the out-of-the-box dashboard, but you can still own code that lives in the backend and it’s decoupled.
And finally, I am really passionate about the idea that commerce can be everywhere and that should be easy. I enjoy helping prospective customers understand our API and how it can be used to drive transactions.
Take me through a typical workday.
My focus is helping prospective clients to understand our system and how it can help their business. I spend a lot of my time preparing for meetings with prospective clients to understand what they need and how we can help them. This prep work often involves creating architecture diagrams, code samples, and workflows in the BigCommerce admin.
The prospect meetings are generally a lot of fun. I love talking to business users or engineering teams to show them how I can make their jobs easier or help growth.
What is your work environment like? Do you work remotely or closely with other team members?
I am a remote employee and share my office with my dog (Grover) and turtle (Ted). This is my first remote role and I have really grown to enjoy it. Although I do miss having an office environment and working in person with my colleagues, I have two young kids and at times work odd hours, so working remotely has really helped me find the balance that I need. I typically am in meetings throughout the day then I am able to come back to write code and tech docs in the evening.
Are there any tools that you use as a developer that has changed the way you work for the better or made you more productive?
For me, it’s serverless frameworks. It brings MACH and event-driven architecture to the world. Deploy middleware or custom business logic to a couple of hour exercise vs the days/months it could take when having to have your own info source. I am interested in how tools like Kafka/Kinesis stream are going to take this concept of moving data and manipulating data in microservices.
And finally, in your opinion, what is an important problem that BigCommerce is solving?
Changing platforms or starting a new business venture can be a huge project. There can be a ton of technical challenges and business needs that have to be addressed. I think BigCommerce plays an important role in tackling these problems to help lay a clear foundation for how things should be done.
We’d like to thank George for sharing his time with us and giving us a look into his day-to-day life at BigCommerce. Have a question for George? Find him on LinkedIn or reach out in the comments below!
