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
- Drove the creation of and current technical lead for the Developer Enablement team
- Defining the roadmap for and building an Internal Developer Portal (IDP), templates (golden paths), exemplars, and libraries
- Focused on increasing developer productivity and satisfaction while reducing cognitive load
- Previous technical Lead for the Existing Products value stream focusing on the Time and Expense domain
- Led the reduction of technical debt and modernization towards an event-driven serverless architecture able to support exponential organizational growth
- Partnering with technical SMEs and product leadership to evaluate and choose a CCaaS provider, so that we can move our telephony to the cloud, increasing agility and stability.
- Led the effort to define the future IVR platform, designing an API-based middleware enabling loose coupling in order to choose the best-in-class CCaaS provider.
- Drove consensus for a Policy Retrieve API design leveraging event-based replication to create a read-side SOE federating legacy and future rating programs.
- Technical domain lead for partner and rater technology; ten product teams supporting partnerships and 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 accelerating development and modernization efforts.
- Collaborated with business partners to build Liberty’s next generation partner APIs while enabling the de-coupled 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 scaffold cloud-ready container-agnostic components with built-in best practices for microservices, CI/CD, Behavior-driven development (BDD), OpenAPI, consumer-driven contracts (CDC), semantic versioning, unit testing, code coverage, static code analysis, log aggregation, monitoring, distributed tracing, and fault tolerance.
- Jump-started a team by creating initial implementation of a loosely coupled quoting system using domain-driven design (DDD), spring boot, docker, event sourcing, CQRS, Kafka, and MongoDB.
- Facilitated event storming workshops to aid in modeling complex business processes and helped produce a facilitators guide for future workshops.
- Domain lead for an SOA-based set of Insurance Quoting and Endorsing Services aimed at consumers.
- Directed the conversion of policy writing services from heavy-weight proprietary BPEL to standard JEE services running on WAS-LP. Accomplished this in parallel with no impact to in-flight development. Increased developer productivity and unit-testability.
- Created a service invocation framework, process template pattern, and custom Eclipse plugin to convert proprietary artifacts to standard java classes.
- Technical lead for re-design of REST layer supporting eCommerce quoting and policy management applications processing 12,000 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.
- Designed and implemented an exception logging and reporting strategy, enabling a reduced failure rate from 4% of quote starts to less than 0.5% of quote starts in production, thus improving quote complete and purchase rates. Included Introducing Splunk to the organization.
- Design and development for a multi-layered JEE application used to sell personal insurance. A high-volume system with thousands of users and peak volumes over 70,000 transactions per hour.
- Participated in re-writing and re-architecting the service layer from a C++ to a Java-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Enabled processing of over 14 million policy transactions per year on a system originally built to handle 2 million, while increasing system availability from 93% to over 99%.
- Implemented a thread-safe response caching mechanism using IBM’s DynaCache, alleviating a CPU bottleneck, resulting in savings of approximately $250k - $300k per year of mainframe CPU 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.