John Plesner
Software Engineer | Product & Platform
- xxx-xxx-xxxx
- john@plesner.ca
- www.plesner.ca
- Toronto, ON.
Software engineer with 10+ years of experience building backend services, internal products, and cloud-hosted applications. Strong background in C#/.NET, Azure, SQL, and distributed systems. Known for owning business-critical systems end to end, improving reliability and scalability, and bridging product, platform, and operational concerns without losing sight of the user or business problem.
Professional Experience
Software Engineer, Delivery & Infrastructure
- Improved engineering throughput across multiple teams by reducing CI times 60% and making build infrastructure easier to understand, review, and evolve.
- Built internal C# tooling to detect expiring certificates, tokens, and app keys, query cloud resources, and send proactive alerts before issues caused outages.
- Redesigned release workflows for site-specific deployments, introducing automation for certificate provisioning, secure service-to-service communication, and more reliable application rollout patterns.
- Introduced a Grafana-based observability stack that improved service visibility and reduced Azure Log Analytics costs.
Software Engineer
- Developed and maintained a multi-service internal platform built with Vue, C#, .NET, Azure App Services, Azure SQL, Service Bus, and Function Apps, supporting internal web and CLI tooling.
- Contributed to a high-risk rewrite of core on-site services, helping migrate functionality from a fragile monolith to a service-oriented architecture using gRPC and event-driven messaging.
- Took long-term technical ownership of a business-critical internal operations platform supporting inventory, maintenance workflows, and operational visibility across multiple sites.
- Improved a Blazor-based operational UI by reworking implementation patterns for better performance, maintainability, and developer productivity.
- Containerized a multi-service internal platform and delivered a Kubernetes-ready deployment in Azure using Docker Compose, Helm, Redis, Kubernetes secrets, and supporting certificate infrastructure.
Senior Product Software Engineer
- Took de facto ownership of a revenue-generating Magento e-commerce platform supporting purchases and subscriptions in US and Canadian markets.
- Developed and maintained integrations between Magento, a legacy .NET / Oracle ordermanagement system, and third-party services including DocuSign and Salesforce to support feature delivery and operational continuity.
- Replaced manual deployment processes with Azure DevOps pipelines and helped expand modern delivery practices across other projects.
- Dockerized the Magento development environment, replacing opaque shared VM images with a reproducible local setup that improved onboarding and developer consistency