What we're working on, and what we're learning as we build the technology behind co-branded credit.
Annie Zhou, who spent nearly a decade building Square’s data platform, reflects on why she joined Imprint, seeing the same data-convergence opportunity she once leveraged at Square, but at an earlier and more pivotal inflection point.
Imprint’s Joy Ebertz argues that not all tech debt deserves remediation, and that engineers should evaluate debt through the lens of business impact rather than engineering aesthetics.
Imprint’s Ron Pierce reflects on what actually drives engineering velocity, arguing it comes not from pressure or long hours but from minimizing the obstacles between noticing a problem and fixing it.
Imprint’s Will Larson revisits the rules of engineering leadership for an era of AI-accelerated development, arguing that while AI makes routine work faster, the real bottlenecks remain organizational alignment, clear decision-making, and durable teams.
Alan Xu, Senior Software Engineer at Imprint, reflects on his first 100 days—comparing Microsoft to startup life, joining during a major partner conversion, and how he uses AI tools like Claude Code and MCPs in his daily workflow.
Steph Lee, Senior Software Engineer at Imprint, shares lessons from early and late-stage startups, her approach to AI tools, when to rebuild vs. fix existing systems, and advice for growing engineers.
Imprint’s Shawna Martell delivered a keynote at QCon San Francisco 2025 exploring how engineering teams make consequential decisions through invisible choices embedded in metrics, defaults, and everyday behaviors.
Our approach to AI adoption: pave the path, find opportunities everywhere, and lead from the front. Strategy testing over optics.
For everything we write on this blog, our goal is to help future colleagues get a sense for working with us. Most of the time we think the best approach to that goal is sharing the details about what we’re actively working on now, but in this post we wanted to take a slightly different tack and give an overview of what we do and how we do it.
In a recent debugging journey, we encountered a puzzling connectivity issue: our deployment tool, Spinnaker, which operates in a backend EKS cluster, suddenly lost access to resources in another cluster used for our public gateway. With recent EKS upgrades underway, we initially suspected a security group misconfiguration. However, this wasn’t a typical connectivity issue as no recent changes could clearly explain it. As we investigated, we found ourselves navigating the complexities of AWS cross cluster routing and subnet configurations in EKS. Each clue pointed us deeper into the architecture, leading to unexpected discoveries about ENI placement and routing behavior within AWS. This blog details our journey through these layers of troubleshooting, the insights we gained, and the lessons learned along the way.
At Imprint, we are building rewarding ways to pay and drive customer engagement, acquisition, and brand loyalty. Central to our rewards platform is the ability to track earning of rewards and balances to ensure customers have access to their rewards and we can report back to our partner brands.
Imprint uses Kafka for streaming realtime data into our data warehouse, along with asynchronous processing. This data includes updates to database entities, external events, webhook payloads, audit logs, and important internal metrics. Before this migration, we used AWS Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK), and Confluent’s Kafka Go library. This worked fine but had a few key issues that motivated us to switch to AWS Serverless MSK and Segment.io’s Kafka Go library.
At Imprint, we have developed an advanced design pattern to manage, fetch and cache brand partner-specific assets, colors, and logos in our mobile app. This system efficiently addresses the growing number of brand partners we support and ensures a seamless experience for our users. This blog post outlines the key features and benefits of our asset management system.
We launched the Imprint mobile app on iOS and Android in just three months, and it was an incredible and unforgettable journey. Building a mobile app is not easy, especially since we always look for faster, easier, and more consistent ways to develop and ship mobile experiences across multiple platforms (Android and iOS). Iterating faster means the team can experiment more and provide a better user experience to their end-users. To enable faster iteration, we must carefully design the application’s architecture to maximize development velocity and minimize developer roadblocks.
Imprint is embracing cloud-native and building its entire realm on Kubernetes. Along the way, we have tried different practices and gradually found the ones that fit our needs best. In this post, we share our journey to a more scalable and robust Kubernetes with you.
As customer acquisition and retention costs skyrocket, branded card programs have become an emerging need for modern brands. Imprint’s first product to market, the branded rewards card, links to consumers’ bank accounts (just like Venmo or Coinbase), and comes without any baggage associated with traditional co-branded credit cards–no credit inquiries, no interest, and absolutely no fees. As of April 2022, we successfully launched 5 branded rewards cards, and we’re excited for what’s still to come.
