Damian Karzon

• Led and grew the Experience Engineering function through hiring, coaching, and clear accountability, building an inclusive high-performance culture focused on continuous improvement and delivery velocity.
• Owned roadmap execution across merchant-facing products, including the merchant portal, onboarding experiences, accounting integrations, and ISV capabilities.
• Operated as part of the executive team, partnering with product, design, and business leaders to balance customer, commercial, and technical priorities and translate strategy into executable plans.
• Acted as a technical anchor for system health, architecture, and code quality while guiding the evolution of the payments platform toward scalable, API-first, enterprise-ready services.
• Drove complex cross-team delivery for the next-generation payments platform, proactively managing dependencies, scope, and risks to maintain delivery velocity and reliability.
• Managed technical relationships with ISV, accounting, and integration partners to unlock new revenue streams and expand platform distribution. Owned and maintained public APIs and documentation to support developer adoption and integration.
• Served as incident commander for merchant-facing and integration incidents, coordinating response and clear ownership across engineering teams.
• Spearheaded AI-first engineering practices by establishing pragmatic standards for tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude, and Cursor to improve developer productivity and quality within a regulated payments environment.
• Raised the bar on operational excellence through strong ownership of reliability, observability, and security posture — including PCI-DSS compliance and ongoing security hardening — across high-volume payment systems.

• Served as technical lead and senior individual contributor, driving architectural decisions, engineering standards, and platform modernisation initiatives.
• Implemented AI-powered automation in developer workflows, including automated code reviews, documentation generation, and intelligent test case creation, reducing manual effort and improving consistency.
• Acted as Developer Advocate, promoting the public payments API and enabling seamless integrations for external developers, resulting in increased adoption and reduced onboarding friction.
• Led development of the Payment Links product, delivering a secure hosted checkout experience that enabled merchants and partners to collect one-off payments through shareable links and workflow integrations.
• Designed and maintained mission-critical accounting system integrations (Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks), ensuring accurate financial data flow and compliance across platforms.
• Built a Chrome extension (React, Tailwind CSS) to embed Pinch Payments data into partner platforms, improving workflow efficiency and user experience. (View Demo)
• Mentored junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and technical guidance, fostering a culture of continuous learning.
• Championed engineering best practices, CI/CD automation, and cloud-native architecture to accelerate delivery cycles, improve code quality, and reduce production incidents.

• Led engineering teams to build and scale WORK180's SaaS platform from early stage to growth, serving hundreds of enterprise employers and empowering workplace diversity initiatives.
• Designed and deployed scalable web services and applications (ASP.NET Core, React, Next.js, Docker, AWS), supporting rapid feature delivery and commercial platform growth.
• Owned the data and BI strategy, implementing Tableau Server to give executives real-time, data-driven visibility into platform performance and business outcomes.
• Prototyped emerging technologies to solve business challenges, reducing technical debt and future-proofing the platform architecture.
• Managed vendor relationships and 3rd-party integrations, ensuring seamless interoperability and cost efficiency.
• Oversaw technical budgeting and forecasting, aligning engineering investments with company growth objectives.

• Developing and maintaining web services and applications (ASP .NET Core, React, Docker, AWS)

• Leading the team of developers for a number of mobile apps and games projects for the company's clients.
• Develop and maintain applications across multiple platforms and technologies. Including Web, Windows, Android, Unity3d and Xamarin.
• Delivery Quality - Ensure that we deliver high quality technical solutions with minimal defects and maximum client happiness.
• Developer Operations - Ensuring effective and efficient usage of automation processes to ensure developers can focus on writing code.

• Developing and maintaining applications across multiple platforms for the company's clients.
• Develop and maintain various developer operations systems to improve company efficiency.

• Developing and maintaining Windows Store and Windows Phone apps for the company's clients.

• Leading the team of software developers for a number of projects across the group.
• Create and maintain applications to support the requirements of businesses in the group.
• Provide support to the group for 3rd party web applications (Content Management Systems, Intranet)
• Dreamworld/White WaterWorld & SkyPoint Ecommerce - Tightly integrated with Point of Sale system and scalable to manage large influx of users (ASP.NET MVC3, .NET 4.0, ASP.NET WCF). Mobile site created with jQuery Mobile. Dreamworld Online Shop
• Goodlife Healthclubs Ecommerce - Rebuilt Ecommerce system specifically built for Goodlife Healthclubs (ASP.NET MVC4, .NET 4.0) www.goodlife.com.au

Formally Maquarie Leisure Operations

• Contracted to integrate and customise a 3rd party ecommerce platform into existing Point of Sale and Reporting systems.