Professional Profile

Highly skilled lead software engineer/architect with 28 years of progressive experience designing and implementing software systems using numerous complementary technologies and polyglot programming paradigms. Extensive experience in scalable enterprise application development and technical leadership for large reactive projects. Very fast learner with excellent communication and mentoring skills. Team player with proven ability to successfully deliver premium class software on time and within budget.

Skills and Experience

Work History

Altara Systems, LLC2000 - PresentVienna, VAFounder and Principal Memberhttp://www.altarasystems.comComcast AI and Discovery LabsTechnical Lead for Runtime Systems Search/BrowseRelevance Engine for Xfinity (REX)

The backbone of Comcast Xfinity's content discovery platform used by all 16.1 million Xfinity video customers and the customers of partner licensees around the world (Cox, FoxTel, Rogers, Sky, Videotron).

REX provides the ability to quickly search for and browse over thousands of movies and shows playing on set top boxes, web clients, and handheld devices; this on-demand and on-air content is sourced from numerous providers, and is filtered by ever changing time windows and individual customer entitlements.

REX comprises of several micro services deployed in multiple kubernetes clusters across a global footprint spanning North America, Europe and Australia (and soon Africa).

Lead a team of 10 developers and 6 testers for the overall design and implementation of latest multi-year development effort
Transplanted core of Apache Solr from a blocking Jetty container into a GRPC enabled, non-blocking Play application (Java, Scala, ScalaPB, Play, Prometheus, Solr, ZIO)
Designed and implemented multiple highly customized Solr collectors, scorers, filter caches, field comparators, and query parser plugins
Designed and implemented a non-blocking web front end that orchestrates numerous remote calls to back end microservices to satisfy a single user request (Scala, ScalaPB, Play, Prometheus, Jaeger, ZIO)
Designed and implemented user friendly fail-slow validation in request handling and configuration parsing (Scalaz, HOCON Config)
Designed and implemented a custom boolean filter parser and grammar used in request handling, and a polymorphic AST parser builder framework (Java, JavaCC, Scala, Fast Parse)
Designed and implemented streaming protobuf API and handlers to maximize local cache hit ratio and minimize end-to-end latency of runtime calls (ZIO, ZStreams, ScalaPB, GRPC/Protocol Buffer)
Designed and implemented a remote shared cache used to decorate search results with requested metadata (Scala, Twitter Finagle, Apache Thrift, Couchbase, Zookeeper, Caffeine, GRPC/Protocol Buffer)
Created a fall back safety net system that serves minimal non-personalized responses when the REX system is under unexpected severe load (Scala, Apache Kafka, Akka Streams, Reactive Kafka, Redis, Redis Sentinel)
Created a custom testing framework for fast/parallel functional testing of stateful platform services across multiple stacks deployed in Kubernetes (Scala, ScalaTest, Helm, ZIO, Play, Couchbase, Solr)
Created numerous Kubernetes Helm charts for development, QA, and production purposes
Ran performance scenarios using production data and request traffic, as well as micro benchmarking of hot spot in order to improve performance taking mechanical sympathy into consideration (Scala, Play, ZIO, Solr Cloud, Prometheus, Grafana, Helm, Kubernetes, JMH)
Created several web based support tools and prototypes (JavaScript, React, Redux, Dagre)
Served as Senior developer on legacy monolith implementation (Java, Solr, Spring, Jetty, HPPC, Trove, JUnit, Jenkins, SonarQube)

United States Government Accountability Office (GAO)Technical Lead for the GAO Engagement Management System projectGAO Engagement Management System (GEMS)

An enterprise integration project focused on replacing legacy systems that are involved in the managing the primary business function of the GAO.

Lead a team of 5 developers
Created a Java based library for interfacing the s3270 IBM 3270 terminal emulator in order to access legacy applications on the National Finance Center mainframe (s3270, Groovy)
Used Groovy for code generation of screen scrapers
Designed and implemented REST services serving semantic JSON messages (Java, Jersey JAX-RS, Jackson, Hibernate, iTextPDF, Oracle Database, Dojo, Sensha Ext JS)

United States Department of Justice - United States Trustees Program (USTP)Java Architect (Subject Matter Expert) / Team Lead for Common Code

Served as chief software architect for the prime’s multi-vendor software development team of 16 developers at USTP on multiple concurrent bankruptcy related projects
Advised and steered the government CIO office on long-term technical strategies
Planned and executed numerous software development and production release efforts

Professional Timekeeping System (PTS)

A web application for collecting non-payroll timesheet metrics related to the Chapter 7, Chapter 11, and Chapter 13 activities performed by attorneys, paralegals, clerk staff, and bankruptcy analysts throughout the United States Trustee Program.

Designed and implemented most of the application including functionality that handles user navigation, page rendering, and database access (Java, JBoss AS, Microsoft SQL Server, JSP JSTL, Apache Struts, Spring, Castor, AspectJ, jQuery, and Hibernate).

Fee Information Collection System (FICS)

A complete redesign of the accounts receivable system that manages the billing and fees collected from all Chapter 11 bankruptcy court cases in the United States. FICS manages roughly $1 million in fee transactions every business day and provides the primary funding for the entire United States Trustee Program.

Designed and implemented most of the web application functionality that handles user navigation, database access, and searching (Java, JBoss AS, DB2/AS400, JSP JSTL, Apache Struts, Spring, Castor, and Hibernate).
Designed and implemented complex business logic that determined what fee is assessed for each debtor on a quarterly basis.

Means Test Review (MTR)

A new software solution for determining the presumption of abuse when analyzing a debtor’s means test as required by the Bankruptcy Abuse Protection and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.

Designed and implemented major portions of the web application and background processes that interface with external and legacy systems (Java, JBoss AS, DB2/AS400, Microsoft SQL Server, JSP JSTL, Apache Struts, Apache ActiveMQ, Spring, Castor, and Hibernate)
Prototyped fully functional search capability using Lucene/Hibernate Search.

Credit Counseling/Debtor Education (CCDE) Certificate Generation System (CGS)

A software solution for managing the credit counseling and debtor education agency debtor certification process as required by the Bankruptcy Abuse Protection and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.

Designed and implemented major portions of the internal web application used to manage all companies providing credit counseling and debtor education services (Java, JBoss AS, DB2/UDB, JSP JSTL, Apache Struts, Spring, and Hibernate)
Completely overhauled the external facing web application responsible for generating certificates signifying the completion of various courses required by the bankruptcy filing process (Java, JBoss AS, JSP JSTL, Apache Struts, Spring, Oracle Database, and Hibernate)
Implemented dynamic PDF certificate generation including embedded bar codes (PDFBox, iTextPDF)

IntradoSenior Software Consultant9-1-1 Information Manager

9-1-1 call center J2EE application that managed street address change request workflow and resulting telephone number/driving direction discrepancies at the municipality level. This application was the first of many that combined functionality from legacy SCC and Lucent Public Safety Systems Group systems - managing more emergency response data records than any other system in the world. Initial customers included Verizon, Pacific Bell, and Southwest Bell.

Implemented a flexible web application framework using XML/XSL/JavaScript page rendering techniques in a web portal architecture (Apache Cocoon, Castor, and Web Logic Server).
Designed and implemented numerous Cocoon/Castor enabled session EJBs and BMP entity EJBs accessing several legacy Informix databases.
Designed a versatile XML report framework for generating reports in HTML, PDF, SVG and Excel formats.
Designed and implemented a multi-threaded RMI server for scheduling report generation during off-peak hours using a customized version of open-source Quartz scheduling libraries.

AvolentSenior Software Engineer ContractorJ1 Electronic Billing and Interactive Customer Care Platform

Pure J2EE XML enabled customer care application suite that allowed a company’s customer base to select and maintain their own products and services over the Internet while allowing the company to conduct business with minimal human interaction. Specific functionality included: electronic billing presentment and payment, product catalog, order entry, trouble ticketing and consolidated billing.

Designed the graphic user interface for a desktop administration application used to configure and manage all aspects of the J1 platform. Implemented “admintool” as a Swing based EJB client.
Implemented admintool modules to manage configuration and deployment settings, inline advertisement graphics, and J1's highly customizable XML based permissions and preferences framework.

Lockheed Martin1996 - 1999Owego, NYSr. Associate Software Developerhttp://www.lockheedmartin.com

Researched emerging Internet technologies under the direction of Dr. Keith Werkman.
Researched emerging distributed computing technologies under the direction of Dr. Will Tracz.
Created a reuse metrics calculator under the direction of Dr. Jeffrey Poulin for his book Measuring Software Reuse: Principles, Practices, and Economic Models.

Battlefield Ministry Tracking and Information System

Prototype hardware/software solution for use by US Army chaplains on the battlefield to deliver pastoral care information back to the sustaining base using a wide range of commercial wireless handheld devices (Win32, WinCE, PalmOS, and DOS). The success of this project opened the door for Lockheed Martin to win four new US Army research contracts.

J. Impson, S. Kupst, N. Mehravari, S. Rush and S. Woods, "Portable wireless battlefield ministration tracking and information system," MILCOM 1999. IEEE Military Communications. Conference Proceedings (Cat. No.99CH36341), Atlantic City, NJ, USA, 1999, pp. 1272-1276 vol.2.

Other Lockheed Martin Achievements

Received Lockheed Martin Award of Excellence

Education

Pennsylvania State University1997University Park, PABachelor of Science in Computer Science

Rochester Institute of Technology1997Rochester, NYAssociate of Applied Science in Computer Science

Certifications

Scrum Alliance - LitheSpeed2011Reston, VAScrum Master Certification

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne2019Coursera

Functional Programming Principles in Scala
Functional Program Design in Scala
Parallel Programming in Scala