A Senior Software Engineer focused on backend systems, platforms, and developer infrastructure. I enjoy building reliable systems that power real products used by real people.

Most recently I was at Block (Square) working on backend systems for restaurants and merchant platforms, helping power the tools thousands of restaurants use every day. I like working at the intersection of distributed systems and product development, collaborating closely with product and design to ship systems that actually improve user experiences.

Once upon a time I was a networking researcher studying edge computing and multipath networking but these days I mostly write fullstack code and would describe myself as a sort of "Software Handyman". Give me an interesting problem and I'll get you a working solution in no time. I love to solve real problems that enable customers to have a great experience.

I enjoy building systems that live behind the scenes but quietly carry a lot of weight. Some things I’ve worked on:

• Commerce platforms supporting restaurant merchants and menu infrastructure
• Internal developer platforms used by hundreds of engineers
• API's and CLI's for internal deveoper tooling
• Secure infrastructure for secrets management and authentication
• Distributed systems and event-driven architectures
• Data pipelines and reporting systems

At Block I:

• Designed large-scale menu migration pipelines enabling adoption of a next-generation merchant platform
• Built Merchant Factory, an internal environment generation platform used by hundreds of engineers enabling better testing and reliability of our products
• Developed menu management APIs used across Square for Restaurants
• Built reporting infrastructure supporting merchant analytics and compliance workflows

These systems contributed to $300M+ in incremental GPV across restaurant merchants.

Kotlin • Go • Java • Node.js • Python • Ruby

AWS • Docker • Kubernetes • Terraform • HashiCorp Vault • Supabase

Distributed systems • Microservices • REST APIs • GraphQL • Event-driven systems • Kafka

When I'm not solving interesting problems at work in the payments/Restaurants space, I'm hard at work exploring how technology can change the social landscape and how we can make community better through technology.

Before Block I worked on:

Backend APIs and infrastructure for secure credential access built on HashiCorp Vault, supporting internal engineering platforms.

Cloud services and distributed device management systems for edge hardware.

• Adjunct faculty teaching Database Systems and Distributed Systems
• Published research on virtualization and networking performance

I’m the founder of the Seattle Social Club, a nonprofit community focused on helping people meet friends and partners offline. We're on a mission to solve loneliness one connection at a time!

• Hosted 60+ sold-out events
• Built internal tools for event operations and attendee networking
• Grew a community of thousands of members across Seattle

I also enjoy building small side projects that explore:

• social software
• developer tools
• systems experimentation

I'm currrently building out a social events platform for small community organizers that will enable connecting all parts of the community organizer ecosystem! Stay tuned for more details!

Since I work in computing, I like to escape from the keyboard as much as possible. I'm either playing pickleball, boardgames, biking, or paddling the nearest waterway.

• Performance Evaluation of Multi-Path TCP For Data Center and Cloud Workloads (ICPE 2019)
• Fast Transparent Virtual Machine Migration in Distributed Edge Clouds (ACM/IEEE SEC 2017)
• Containers and Virtual Machines at Scale: A Comparative Study (ACM Middleware 2016)

If you're building interesting systems or hiring backend engineers who enjoy diving deep into the details and solving problems:

📧 lucaschaufournier@gmail.com 📍 Seattle, WA

According to French Wikipedia, "The chaufournier is, in the production of quicklime , the worker driver of the lime kiln." In essence, its a lime burner.