Seb Barre (CA)
Staff Software Engineer at Shopify
Previously worked as Digital Platform Product Lead at TELUS
Based in Ottawa, where he recently (2024) moved from Toronto
Meet Seb at:
CMS Connect 26
Presentation: There’s no AI in team: Why agents need organisational knowledge
Dates: August 4 - 5
Location: Montreal
About Seb Barre
Seb Barre is a Staff Software Engineer at Shopify, where he has worked since July 2025 on the Privacy Engineering team, based remotely from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He is an experienced technology leader with a proven track record across problem solving, product engineering, team leadership, and software delivery. Before joining Shopify, he spent over five years at TELUS, moving through several senior engineering leadership roles across the company's platform and technology organization, consistently focused on building the tooling and systems that other teams rely on to ship customer-facing products faster and more reliably.
Seb's expertise centers on developer tooling and platform engineering, with particular strength in reducing toil, increasing team velocity, and building systems that let other engineers ship customer-facing products more reliably. He has deep experience in content platform architecture and Google Cloud Platform, and has repeatedly stepped into engineering leadership roles that bridge hands-on technical work with team and organizational strategy. His background also includes helping establish standards and best practices across design and engineering communities of practice, reflecting a broader interest in strengthening how technical teams work, not just what they build.
About Shopify
Shopify is a global commerce platform that enables businesses of all sizes to start, scale and manage online and offline sales. Founded in Canada in 2006, it brings together storefront creation, payments, fulfilment and marketing in a single platform, and today supports millions of merchants around the world, from independent brands to large enterprises.
The company employs around 8,000 people globally, with teams spanning engineering, product, sales, marketing and partner ecosystems. While Shopify operates internationally, it remains a flagship Canadian technology company, with its origins in Ottawa and a strong influence on the country’s tech and startup landscape.
By market capitalisation, Shopify has at times been Canada’s most valuable publicly listed company and is widely recognised as the country’s largest and most influential software firm by that measure. Its scale, reach and ecosystem have made it a defining force in modern commerce and a reference point for how Canadian technology companies can compete and lead on a global stage.
Blog posts with Seb
Previous Boye conference appearances
CMS Kickoff 25
Presentation: Content Platform Evolution at TELUS in 2025
CMS Connect 24
Presentation: Solving the Headless Observability Gap