Richard F

Software Engineering Manager

Jun 2022 - Nov 2023 • 1 yr 5 mos

Led a team of engineers on a project to rewrite the company's entire loan management software system in an agile environment as described below. Was in charge of deploying production code to AWS hosted environment. As team manager I hired, trained, mentored, directed and evaluated the work of a group of technical professionals. Worked with the team to establish priorities, develop work schedules and to monitor progress. Provided technical leadership in the architecture and design of new systems and software and served as a go-to resource for any problem. Worked with management to improve the company hiring process by having candidates develop algorithms in interviews. Successfully used these techniques to hire strong candidates. On boarded several new employees and mentored them into careers as Software Engineers. Coordinated communication between my own team and the Data science and Project Management teams. Close coordination between our teams was key to the success of our project rollout. In addition to management responsibilities, I continued to play a technical role. For example, wrote several bash scripts to facilitate the movement of terabytes of data out of MySQL and into Amazon S3. This required transforming the data as it was pulled from a relational database, verifying data integrity and uploading it to the AWS cloud. It also involved working odd hours to avoid overloading the production database with the voluminous number of queries. Wrote a cron job to accomplish the same upload-to-S3 task for all new data, saving it from having to be moved later. Took over responsibility of an entire code base managed by five contractors after their contracts expired. Tracked issues and work progress using Jira.

Integrations Engineer

Oct 2021 - Jun 2022 • 8 mos

Built instrument packages within existing systems to interact with third party vendor APIs using both XML and JSON objects. The packages were used by select customers to do A/B testing of the vendor's products to see if they would be of value. The results of the tests were used to generate reports that management used to procure new software. Was tasked with troubleshooting issues with legacy cron jobs that generated critical financial reports. This often involved optimizing MySQL queries by adding indexes and tuning SQL. Greater efficiencies were achieved by moving data processing from SQL queries into programs. This fixed several reports that would not run due to a 15 minute timeout into running in a matter of seconds. Upon being hired I was given a large-scale project to completely reverse engineer the two most important systems used to run the company. I was tasked with understanding the code bases that no other person at the company understood. I then was responsible for developing a plan to merge and rewrite them in a modern web framework using API best practices. One of these systems was particularly tricky because the codebase was software that was purchased from a third party. Over the course of a year, I and my team transformed in house PHP scripts and an outdated vendor API running on the Zend framework into a fully modern API running on the PHP Laravel platform using the MVC design pattern. As part of this effort I mentored the entire development team in the process of writing automated unit and integration tests. This led to a company wide effort to refactor and add tests to all existing code. I personally wrote unit tests providing coverage for greater than 80% of the code base. The project also included rewriting queries from direct SQL into a modern interface using the Eloquent ORM. Following the successful rewrite of the entire code base, the team and I introduced continuous integration and delivery to the company and began transitioning