Matthew Essenburg
Engineering leader with 20+ years scaling consumer fintech, payments, and ad tech platforms. At PayPal, I lead a 33-person engineering organization (3 manager direct reports) building global loyalty and rewards systems that drove +3.5% incremental TPV in the UK launch. Previously founded and led the team behind Honey Pay Later through Honey’s $4B acquisition by PayPal. Patent holder focused on AI-accelerated delivery and agentic engineering workflows.
Focus Areas
- Java, TypeScript, Python
- Microservices on GCP and AWS
- Event-driven promotions and loyalty systems
- Spanner and BigQuery
- AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Codex, agentic workflows)
- Engineering leadership and org scaling
Patent & Education
Education: San Diego State University (Bachelor of Science, Computer Engineering)
Professional Experience
Lead a 33-person engineering organization building PayPal’s global loyalty and promotions platform.
- Launched PayPal UK loyalty program, driving +3.5% incremental TPV and lifting week-1 first-time-user retention from 15.1% to 21.8%
- Scaled platform to 1.9M earn-active members with ~300K monthly enrollments in UK; US launch early segments showing ARPU lifts up to +62%
- Operate multi-region microservices processing millions of transactions daily across PayPal branded checkout
- Scaled to 6,500+ merchant offers through affiliate rails processing hundreds of thousands of attribution signals per day
- Manage 3 engineering managers; introduced hiring loops (15 new SWEs), brown bags, and operational excellence practices
- Driving adoption of AI-assisted development workflows (Claude Code, Pi, Codex, agentic tooling) across organization
Founded and led engineering for Honey Pay Later, Honey’s first financial product with point-of-sale installment loans.
- Built loan origination service and ETL pipeline powering underwriting decisions using Honey’s 17M-user shopping dataset
- Led Plaid bank-linking integration and KYC/identity verification for lending compliance
- Built virtual card issuance system enabling checkout funding across e-commerce merchants
- Delivered autopay and repayment engine, repeat-borrower flow, and admin tooling
- First-year outcomes: 5,000+ loans issued, $600K+ funded, 0.03% delinquency rate
- Also led Honey Gift Card Checkout engineering (10-person team), including patented point-of-sale offer technology and ~$100M annual gift card sales
Led engineering for Bankrate and The Points Guy, serving millions of monthly users across financial comparison products.
- Architected microservices supporting monetization and affiliate revenue flows
- Built secure PII platform for financial service application and lead routing
- Managed distributed engineering and product teams across HQ and remote offices
Technology leader for programmatic advertising analytics SaaS serving Disney, The New York Times, and other major publishers.
- Led 20-engineer organization on $5M annual budget; reported to CEO
- Architected ETL pipelines processing millions of ad records daily across ad platforms
- Built multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure for ad operations analytics and reconciliation reporting using Kubernetes and BigQuery
- Created and scaled TagScan to verify ad tags to IAB standards before launch
- Created product organization to expand into programmatic and header bidding
Developed mission-critical defense software systems for U.S. Air Force TACP.
- Technical lead on TACP releases 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 with cross-functional engineering team
- Provided worldwide technical training and launch support for Rosetta SDK
- Key technical member on Rosetta engine rewrite from C++ to Java