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Engineering Manager · PublicSquare
−code only its author can reason about
+systems any teammate can pick up

I'm Danny Schnacky, an engineering manager and full-stack engineer in Hudson, Wisconsin. Fifteen years of building for the web — Target, Rollbar, Dandy, and now PublicSquare, where I lead the marketplace team and a newer team in our fintech division. I lead by making the right thing the easy thing: design systems, single-concern components, tested pipelines, and documentation that means the next person doesn't have to ask.

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Leading teams since
2017
Shipping since
2010
Core stack
TypeScript · React · GraphQL
Based in
Hudson, WI

History

The log, most recent first

Fifteen years, from hand-coding PHP themes to running teams. Each entry is what changed while I was there.

current2024 — present

Engineering Manager · PublicSquare

  • Promoted from principal engineer to lead the marketplace team, then took on a second team in the fintech division.
  • Spearheaded the 1.0 of our merchant self-service portal, handing merchants direct control of their own catalog and assets.
  • That portal cut the support burden enough to change how we plan — the team spends its time on features instead of fielding merchant requests.
  • Focused the team on breaking work down small enough to actually finish, and on a delivery cadence people can plan around.
ReactTypeScriptNext.jsVercelPostgresGraphQLJestPlaywright
2023 — 2024

Principal Engineer · PublicSquare

  • Joined as tech lead to build out the marketplace ecommerce product, architecting the top-of-funnel and commerce flows.
  • Refactored the mobile repository into a streamlined monorepo on Yarn workspaces and Turborepo.
  • Implemented mobile live updates with CapGo, so iOS and Android changes could ship without waiting on an app store review.
  • Built a single reusable design system for the frontend — branding and color changes stopped being a cross-repo excavation.
ReactTypeScriptNext.jsVercelPlaywrightCapacitorSanity
2022 — 2023

Senior II Engineer · Dandy

  • Tech lead and full-stack engineer on an event-sourced workflow, standing up new tables and fields for a more robust data model.
  • Refactored authentication and documented the flow so the rest of the org could finally follow it.
  • Wrote run books that turned tribal knowledge into something anyone on the team could execute.
  • Carried large epics end to end — design audit, feasibility, scoping, iterative release through BuildKite.
ReactTypeScriptGraphQLTypeORMCypress
2021 — 2022

Staff Frontend Engineer · Rollbar

  • Set the standards for frontend development — component design aimed at velocity and a consistent UI implementation.
  • Raised effective test coverage and established development standards that improved stability and reliability.
  • Led schema design for new APIs and for migrating existing REST endpoints to GraphQL.
ReactTypeScriptGraphQLTailwind UICypress
2017 — 2021

Lead UI Engineer · Target

  • Led a team of five engineers delivering the programmatic ad-tech planning application behind all of Target advertising.
  • Built an atomic component system that composed the entire UI across three teams of engineers and product.
  • Used Redux to normalize and reshape vendor API responses into something the UI could reason about.
  • Partnered with Java backend engineers on efficient APIs, and started the organization's move toward GraphQL.
ReactReduxJS/TSGraphQLCypress
2014 — 2017

Senior Engineer · Target

  • Worked top-of-funnel on Target.com through a wholesale refactor from Backbone and JSPs to Node, Express, and React.
  • Built a small army of accessible components — video player, product carousels — consumed by the CMS team and enriched with content before render.
  • Developed the accessibility expertise that still shapes how I review frontend work.
ReactBackboneJS
first commit2010 — 2014

Earlier · where the habits came from

  • 2014Best Buy — contract. Recommendations carousel and a lazy-loading mechanism for BestBuy.com.
  • 2013—2014Bluestem Brands — software engineer. Built a leadership reporting tool on Java and the BoldChat API, rendering infographics with PhantomJS and mailing them to the exec team.
  • 2012—2013Internet Broadcasting — production services developer. Interactive features for news and television stations, with cross-browser compatibility and progressive enhancement.
  • 2011—2012Interactive Circle — lead web developer. Responsive applications with a PHP CMS backend and custom jQuery plugins for client presentations.
  • 2010—2011ResortsAndLodges.com — web developer. PSD to semantic markup, custom Concrete5 plugins, WordPress themes, and native JavaScript apps.

How I lead

What you're actually getting

With teams

My goal is to be the teammate people trust and the source of habits that stick. I invest in the culture deliberately, because velocity across teams comes from ownership over the product, not pressure. The flow of communication and delivery turns out to matter enormously in how work actually gets picked up and finished.

With systems

Single-concern components that are easy to reason about and easy to test. Design systems so the UI stops being re-litigated. Data normalized at the boundary rather than patched at the edges. Automated testing and deployment, so consistency is enforced by the pipeline instead of by memory.

Across the org

I can hold a technical conversation with engineers and then hold the same conversation with product, sales, or marketing without either side losing the thread. That translation is most of the job. Architectural decisions land better when the people funding them understand the tradeoff, and roadmaps land better when engineering hears what the business is actually optimizing for. I'd rather spend an hour making a tradeoff legible than a quarter building the wrong thing.

Selected work

Three things I'd want to be judged on

2024
PublicSquare

Merchant self-service portal, 1.0

Merchants couldn't manage their own catalog or assets, so every change became a support ticket and a tax on engineering. I spearheaded the first version of a portal that handed that control back to them — which freed the team to plan features instead of absorbing requests.

2023
PublicSquare

Mobile monorepo and live updates

Shipping mobile changes meant waiting on app store review. I refactored the mobile repository into a Yarn workspaces and Turborepo monorepo, then led the CapGo implementation for live updates — so iOS and Android fixes could go out on our schedule rather than Apple's.

2017—2021
Target

Ad-tech planning platform

Leading five engineers, I delivered the programmatic planning application used across Target advertising. The durable part was the atomic component system underneath it: one vocabulary that three teams of engineers and product could compose the entire UI from.

Contact

Standards that hold, systems people can pick up, teams that ship without me in the room.

That's what I bring wherever I land. If you're weighing a design system, an org that's outgrown its process, or a frontend platform that needs an owner, that's the conversation I enjoy most — email is the fastest way to reach me.

dschnacky10@gmail.com
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