Exercise equipment manufacturer · 18 months
$145K $ 0 /yr
Replatformed a proprietary SaaS storefront onto custom WooCommerce. 30× revenue lift in eighteen months.
Twenty years building the web.
Pierre Balian
Full Stack Developer, Security Specialist, Ecommerce Wizard, and Lots More
Hello, my name is Pierre - and I’m looking for a new position. I can do a lot of things really well. If I had to specifically tailor a resume to my specialties I would have to make something like a dozen different variations. And nobody has time for that!
I think I would be a good fit for a B2C with a strong product range that wants to ditch their agency and bring it all in house. With strong technical leadership and the capabilities of AI it’s more than possible. You can save a lot of money and heartache. Having interfaced with hundreds of business clients over the years I know the pain points and how to get past them.
My latest position has been Director of Web Technology and Security for a digital agency in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In that role I have been responsible for choosing our development tooling, strategy, advising clients on technical matters, preparing work quotes and budgets, security remediation of client infrastructure, AI integration efforts, developing internal security practices (phishing, email security, credential management, cloud infrastructure).
Even with all that going on I’m still cranking out websites for clients. At my current employer we are building bespoke Wordpress websites from styleframes and design comps. But I am comfortable working in almost any stack or CMS. Now that AI is writing the majority of the code stack really seems irrelevant. I built this site using Astro and Sanity CMS, GSAP for animations, and it is deployed on Cloudflare pages.
About
Senior Web Engineer with the Skills to Pay the Bills
Designer. Coder. Sysadmin. Ecommerce.
Two things really tickle my brain: Process, and systems. That’s my spectrum of the ‘tism.
Nothing frustrates me more than seeing something with an easy solution that could be so much better.
I’ve always been a person who prides himself on solving tough problems. When I find something I don’t know, I learn it. I read everything I can find about it. I immerse myself in it. I become an expert in it.
I’m constantly building continuous optimization and improvements in everything I do. No half-assing it. Ever.
Capabilities
Many Disciplines
Self ranked. Click any for Details.
Select Imparct
Some Career Wins and Statistics
Internal tools
Some tools I have built
01 In production
A Cloudflare operations dashboard you investigate in plain English.
Ask Claude — "why did Singapore spike at 4am?", "show me bot patterns this week", "block the AI scrapers" — and it runs the Cloudflare Analytics GraphQL, renders the answer as charts and a live world map showing traffic arcs: backbone routes and direct-to-server hits in distinct colors. Cache purges, WAF rule changes, and AI-bot blocks are one approval click away — Claude proposes, you confirm.
02 In production
An AI-powered alt-tag plugin for WordPress that only touches images in use.
Scans the media library, then filters to images actually referenced in posts, Gutenberg blocks, and ACF fields — orphans don't burn tokens. Passes each surviving image to OpenAI with full surrounding page context, writes semantically accurate alt text back to the attachment.
03 In production
A multi-site WordPress maintenance hub that replaced six manual processes.
Live WordPress + plugin inventory across the portfolio, cross-referenced against CVE feeds. One-click updates, health checks, and automated AM & client email notifications when something needs attention.
04 In production
An admin-bar WordPress debug tool with both per-page and site-wide inspection.
One toggle opens a tabbed modal. Per-page: post + ACF data, template hierarchy, REST routes for current type, enqueued scripts/styles, redirect chains (.htaccess, Redirection, Rank Math, Yoast). Site-wide: server environment, PHP version + extensions, image library support (GD/ImageMagick), wp_options stats by category, transient count, WP_*/DB_*/AUTH_* constants with secrets masked, live debug.log tail.
05 In production
A WordPress Multisite extractor that turns any sub-site into a deployable zip.
Picks any sub-site from WordPress Multisite network admin and produces a standalone archive: chunked SQL with on-the-fly URL rewriting, serialized data recursively unwrapped, network plugins merged into active_plugins, user roles copied, multisite upload paths flattened.
Career
I Like to Stick Around
- 2016 — Now
Rocket55
- Director of Web Technology & Security Dec 2024 — Present
- Senior Frontend Developer Apr 2017 — Dec 2024
- Frontend Developer Dec 2016 — Apr 2017
Own platform architecture, infrastructure, and technical strategy across hundreds of client properties. Architect Cloudflare/DNS/server configuration; team executes day-to-day. Lead solution architecture for $40K–$200K engagements.
Claude came up with that based on my resume. But I’ve been at this company for 10 years. I really got to grow here - and its all because I had a great boss that fostered our creativity and let us naturally settle into our roles. Our strengths were celebrated and we were a tight crew isolated from all the drama in the other teams. We were where the rubber met the road. But things change and it’s time to go.- Responsible for standardization, frameworks, and new technologies
- Developed web tools and processes
- Advised clients in technical matters
- Was a technical advisor for SEO, SXO, Revops, security, email, DNS, and UI/UX.
- Integrated AI solutions into practical workflows
- Set development budgets and estimated work costs
- Acted as bullshit detector and enforced budgets, determined out of scope work.
- 2014 — 2016
Hooker & Company Advertising
- Old school agency experience with a monopoly on the Minneapolis/St. Paul grocery market at the time. Cub, Kowalski’s, Rainbow, Jerry’s. Print, POS, direct mail, and weekly circulars. Dozens of regional food brands, as well as businesses in other markets including automotive, health care, managed services. I learned a lot here, and “wore many hats”. It was a dynamic work environment that strictly adhered to the mad men era agency rules.
- Responsible for all design composites, mockups, and UI/UX Design and was technical owner during pitches and ongoing client relations
- Managed marketing automation for multiple brands
- Managed bare metal colocated server infrastructure for clients, including billing, deployment, and maintenance.
- Trained and mentored the other departments in technology, best practices, and really anything they weren’t well informed with in regards to technology.
- 2004 — 2014
Balian Design
Ah, to be young again. My brother and I thought it would be a good idea to start our own web development company. This was a different time. CSS was a new technology at the time and Content Management Systems were just starting to be introduced. I got my start using a CMS called Movable Type, which lead to Mambo, which then forked and became Joomla. Then once the market settled on Wordpress I went all in on that. It’s crazy that it’s 20 years later and most agencies are still using Wordpress because it is what clients want.
Hire Pierre
Let's
talk.
Twenty years of platform engineering. Open to senior in-house, contract, and technical leadership roles.