Romario Raffington

Co-Founder / Principal Engineer

Jamaica

About

Experienced software engineer and startup founder with a demonstrated history of working in the technical product and service industries. I currently work at Automattic where I'm charged with maintaining the infrastructure and user flows to support Billing and Payments for our first-party products on WordPress.com, Jetpack, Crowdsignal, Akismet, and Tumblr. Before joining Automattic, I founded a venture-backed startup focused on building risk models using alternative data to underwrite loans for U.S. importers.

Experience

  • Co-Founder at FD Labs
    Aug 2025 - Present · 1 yr

    ● Founded and built FD Labs, delivering production-grade consumer apps (TripSpire, Prepist) ● Engineered content extraction pipelines combining LLMs, OCR, and media processing to transform unstructured social content into structured, queryable data ● Designed fault-tolerant job processing systems with queue orchestration, retries, and rate-limited external API integrations to support high-latency workflows ● Operated and scaled infrastructure across compute, storage, and CDN layers, improving latency, throughput, and cost efficiency

  • Principal Software Engineer at Norus Technologies
    Apr 2025 - Present · 1 yr 4 mos

    ● Architect and lead the development of scalable, high-performance platforms across multiple client projects. ● Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to translate business objectives and maintainable engineering solutions. ● Oversee code quality, reviews, and deployment pipelines, driving best practices in testing, CI/CD, and performance ● Mentor and guide engineers, fostering a culture of technical ownership, continuous learning, and high-quality delivery.

  • Senior Software Engineer at Automattic
    Jun 2020 - Apr 2025 · 4 yrs 11 mos

    ● Developed Tumblr’s payment infrastructure that facilitated payments via In-app purchases and the web ● Pioneered the development of the Paid Newsletter feature for WordPress.com and Jetpack to compete with Substack ● Redesigned the Paid Newsletter feature for WordPress.com and Jetpack based on user feedback and insights ● Pioneered the development of AI Assistant for WordPress.com and Jetpack ● Created the first metered billing solution in the company that allowed us to provide a more user-friendly billing option for our Blaze Ad product.

  • Software Engineer at SafeGraph
    Feb 2020 - Jun 2020 · 5 mos

    My role centered around supercharging key business operations and high-value projects to drive the company forward. ● Created a tool that allowed anyone at Safegraph to screenshot our graphs over time and create videos from those images in order to increase our marketing efforts ( as seen on CNN ) ● Utilized Safegraph data to share daily insights into how Americans were sheltering in place and returning to the new normal as the economy reopens during the pandemic ● Reduced the build time of one of our major dashboards from 6 hours to 6 minutes and 52 seconds

  • Software Engineer at devlabs
    Feb 2020 - Jun 2020 · 5 mos

    Created products to assist grassroots organizations and non-profits in Oakland and San Francisco. Two of the most impactful projects were: ● A platform that pulled data from partner organizations' CRM and cross-referenced with the voter's list to allow the partner organizations to easily locate precincts where unregistered voters were located. ● A platform to support the Fiscal Sponsorship program of a non-profit.