Profile
Principal Engineer and Architect with over 25 years of experience designing and developing large scale systems on-prem and in the cloud. A constant learner who is passionate about quality engineering and enabling developers to innovate while providing value to the business and customers.
Experiences
- Accelerated implementation of a key employment certificate generation feature. Exceeded legacy feature parity while pioneering an innovative development blueprint leveraging LLM-based AI Agents across the implementation and delivery phases, establishing an organizational AI workspace standard.
- Drove the creation of and became technical lead for the Developer Enablement and Platform Engineering team.
- Defined the initial roadmap for and built an Internal Developer Portal (IDP), templates (golden paths), automated CI/CD pipelines, exemplars, and libraries to streamline cloud-native deployments, significantly increasing developer productivity while reducing cognitive load.
- Built API-first templates for serverless microservices, including AWS API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, OpenAPI, TypeScript, and Java.
- Developed GitHub Actions-based pipelines leveraging OIDC, secure secrets management, and IAM roles to securely build, test, and deploy resilient code to AWS.
- Led the Time and Expense domain through a reduction of technical debt and modernization towards an event-driven serverless architecture able to support exponential organizational growth.
- Partnered with technical SMEs and product leadership within an Agile delivery framework to evaluate and choose a CCaaS provider, moving telephony to the cloud to increase agility and stability.
- Analyzed complex technical challenges and led the effort to define the future IVR platform, designing an API-based middleware enabling loose coupling to choose the best-in-class CCaaS provider.
- Served as technical domain lead for partner and rater technology across the P&C insurance domain, directing 10 product teams supporting integrations for the Safeco and Liberty brands, and Book Transfer operations.
- Developed exemplar implementations of CDK-based AWS API Gateway, Lambda, DocumentDB, and DynamoDB stacks, establishing reusable patterns that accelerated cloud development and modernization efforts.
- Collaborated with business partners to architect next-generation partner APIs, web services (REST/SOAP), and messaging systems, enabling the decoupled, transactionally consistent evolution of our core quoting architecture.
- Technical lead during inception of a developer enablement team (DNA) providing a framework comprised of tools, patterns, practices, and a cloud-native platform to allow teams to focus on delivering business value rapidly.
- Created generators that scaffolded cloud-ready, containerized components (Docker) with built-in observability (log aggregation, distributed tracing, monitoring), robust testing practices (BDD, unit testing, code coverage), and schema evolution best practices.
- Designed and configured the initial implementation of a loosely coupled quoting system utilizing an API-first design, domain-driven design (DDD), Spring Boot, Docker, event sourcing, CQRS, Kafka, and NoSQL (MongoDB).
- Facilitated event storming workshops to analyze complex business processes, model core workflows, and author a facilitator’s guide for future cross-team knowledge sharing.
- Domain lead for an SOA-based set of P&C Insurance Quoting and Endorsing Services, aligning system standards with long-term business goals.
- Directed the conversion from proprietary BPEL to standard JEE services running on WAS-LP in parallel with no impact to in-flight development, successfully increasing developer productivity and software testing capabilities.
- Created a service invocation framework, process template pattern, and custom Eclipse plugin to convert proprietary artifacts to standard Java classes.
- Technical lead for the redesign of the RESTful Web Services layer supporting eCommerce quoting and policy management applications processing 12k quotes (160,000 business transactions) per day.
- Migrated from a legacy struts-based application to a Web 2.0 SPA using RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) with JSON payloads, integrating SOA-based business services.
- Engineered an advanced exception logging, audit trail, and reporting strategy that reduced the failure rate from 4% of quote starts to less than 0.5%, and introduced Splunk for enhanced platform observability.
- Designed and developed a high-volume, multi-layered Java (JEE) application with thousands of users, maintaining transactional consistency during peak volumes over 70,000 transactions per hour.
- Re-architected legacy C++ services to a Java-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), successfully scaling capacity from 2 million to over 14 million policy transactions per year while increasing system availability from 93% to over 99%.
- Implemented a thread-safe response caching mechanism using IBM’s DynaCache, resolving a critical CPU bottleneck and resulting in an annual savings of approximately $250k - $300k in mainframe costs.
- Developed two EDM systems allowing users to view a virtual claim file, thereby reducing paper handling costs and improving customer response times.
- Key contributor to the implementation of Guidewire ClaimCenter, developing multiple novel enhancements that the vendor incorporated into their product.