A leading technology-enabled residential real estate brokerage, Compass, Inc., has  announced that Shopify CTO Allan Leinwand has been appointed to the company’s Board of Directors. One of the most widely-respected leaders in technology, Leinwand brings decades of engineering experience to the Compass board.

“Allan is widely recognized as an engineering visionary who has applied his experience and passion for technology to reducing the barriers entrepreneurs face as they grow their businesses,” said Founder, Chairman and CEO of Compass, Robert Reffkin. “One of our core principles at Compass is to ‘maximize your strengths’ and Allan’s strong engineering leadership background will ensure we continue to focus on investing in technology that empowers Compass agents with more time and tools so they can provide great experiences to their clients.”

Throughout his career, Leinwand has held a range of leadership positions at transformational technology companies. In October 2021, he joined Shopify from Slack, where he had served as SVP of Engineering since December 2018. Prior to Slack, Leinwand was CTO at ServiceNow, an enterprise cloud company where he oversaw all technical aspects and led the company’s long-term technology strategy. Before ServiceNow, he was CTO of Infrastructure at Zynga, where he focused on building one of the largest consumer cloud computing environments used to deliver the company’s social games. Earlier in his career, Leinwand was the founding CEO of Vyatta, an open-source networking company, which was eventually acquired by Brocade. Leinwand currently serves on the board of trustees of Harvey Mudd College, is a director of Anaplan, and sits on the advisory boards of Nylas and Bulletproof 360.

“Compass is an innovator in the real estate space much like Shopify has been for commerce,” said Leinwand. “Both have created platforms that make it easier for entrepreneurs of any kind to start, run, and grow their business. The continued commitment from Compass to invest in technology for real estate agents makes this an exciting time to join the board.”

In less than ten years, Compass has become the largest residential real estate brokerage in the United States.1 The company is home to over 26,000 agents who, powered by the Compass platform, cover nearly half of the United States population.