Tokyo

Duane Garber

Staff engineer · former Director and VP of Engineering · 20 years

I build payments, marketplaces and the data platforms underneath them, mostly on Google Cloud.

About

I joined Honey as its 8th engineer and was promoted to Director as the company grew to over 400 people. I was an engineering director through its $4B acquisition by PayPal, L.A.'s biggest tech deal at the time, and stayed on at PayPal leading teams in Shopping until 2023.

Since then I've been a VP of Engineering at two startups and then went back to hands-on Staff work at Pie / ZeroClick. In a flat engineering org there, I owned two-sided marketplace payments, product search, high-volume data pipelines, and the company's Google Cloud and Datadog relationships.

I do my best work on 0-to-1 builds, where I set technical direction and also write a lot of the code. In April 2026 I moved from Los Angeles to Tokyo, where I'm studying Japanese full time.

Experience

  1. Pie / ZeroClick

    2024 – 2026

    Staff Software Engineer

    Pie was a browser-extension ad blocker that shared ad revenue with its users. In 2025 the company launched ZeroClick, a two-sided ad marketplace between advertisers and AI chatbot developers.

    • Built ZeroClick's two-sided marketplace payments from scratch on Stripe Connect in four months: onboarding, compliance and payouts for advertisers and developers.
    • Designed an event ingestion pipeline (Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery) handling 2.5B requests a month, replacing a third-party vendor.
    • Architected Pie's analytics platform (1B+ events a month) with a versioned schema repo for zero-downtime upstream changes, at a fraction of the cost of Segment or Amplitude.
    • Built merchant vector search on Gemini embeddings and Spanner ANN, returning matches in under 500ms.
    • Owned GCP infrastructure in Terraform, plus the Google Cloud and Datadog relationships, contracts and cost management.

  2. Reshop · MillionPugs

    2023 – 2024

    VP of Engineering

    • Reshop (instant refunds for shoppers): led a 12-person engineering team and hired 5 engineers in 3 months; set engineering strategy and delivery timelines with company leadership.
    • MillionPugs (shopping rewards that earn gamers in-game content): owned all engineering, from product direction to shipping production code.

  3. Honey → PayPal

    2016 – 2023

    Senior Engineer → Lead → Director of Software Engineering

    Joined Honey as the 8th engineer in 2016. Acquired by PayPal for $4B, closing January 2020; I stayed on as a Director in PayPal's Shopping organization until April 2023.

    • Grew from leading a 5-person team to leading 30+ engineers across cross-functional teams, and ran the Core Engineering org that owned developer tooling and infrastructure.
    • Lead architect for Droplist (15M+ active users) and the Product Catalog (30M+ products across 1,500+ stores), from MVP to production scale.
    • Led the zero-downtime migration of every backend database from MySQL to Cloud Spanner, and back-to-back zero-downtime Black Fridays serving millions of users a day.
    • At PayPal, managed 15–30 engineers and cut Shopping's Google Cloud costs by over 25% ($3M+ a year).

Projects

  • JLPT Kanji

    A local-first kanji study app for my Japanese class: offline PWA, tested merge rules for cross-device sync on Supabase, and a class leaderboard. Built entirely with agentic coding.

Tools

  • Spanner
  • BigQuery
  • Dataflow
  • Pub/Sub
  • GKE
  • Vertex AI
  • Terraform
  • Stripe Connect
  • TypeScript / Node.js
  • GraphQL
  • Datadog
  • Agentic AI coding