About Me

Hello, I'm Charlie Spalevic. I'm a senior software engineer based in Chicago with about a decade of experience. I consider myself a generalist - I'm equally interested in building web apps, mobile apps, AI agents, and more.

I studied Computer Science at Illinois State University, where I also worked as a TA and as a research assistant on a social media data collection program. I built pipelines around the Twitter API, Google Maps API, and Stanford CoreNLP for semantic analysis.

After college I took a swing at starting my own company. It didn't quite work, and I also quickly realized I didn't really know what I was doing. I decided I needed real-world experience before I could build something meaningful on my own.

I gained a ton of experience at a manufacturing company called Spraying Systems. It was a small team that shipped a ton of software around internal DAM, ERP and CRM systems. I worked with .NET, Azure, and SQL Server.

From there I joined PayPal, where I'm now a Senior Software Engineer on Checkout - a surface that handles millions of transactions globally. I started on the Global Pay Later team building virtual card experiences. I was then moved to Checkout and grew into lead roles on some of its larger initiatives. I helped migrate PayPal Checkout onto a modern tech stack with Next.js, Tailwind, TypeScript, and Playwright. Along the way I've spent a ton of time on A/B experimentation, observability with Datadog, and more recently building AI-powered agents that analyze and debug user sessions to cut down time-to-resolution on production issues.

Outside of my day job I've been working on Chavo. The basic idea is to have a personal trainer in my pocket. Previously, I would have Claude/ChatGPT to build my workout plans and I wanted to have an all-in-one app to help build, track and analyze my workouts.

Outside of my nerdy pursuits, I focus a lot of my time on lifting, running, following sports, reading, and hanging out with friends and family.