Aug 2021 – Present · 4 yrs 9 mos

• Distinguished Engineer for the American Express Acquiring and Payment Network, with a focus on Payments Platforms.
• My role is a blend of Architect, Craftsperson, and Mentor. I focus on building low-latency, high-scale cloud-native applications that form the foundation for both card and non-card payments.
• I also serve in a meta-role as Head Engineer for Acquiring and Payment Network, acting as a bridge between my domain and the enterprise. In this capacity, I influence and drive initiatives across the organization, ensuring our platforms are built for performance, resiliency, and the future.
• Key responsibilities include:
• Driving strategic and innovative initiatives through technical expertise and thought leadership.
• Designing fast, resilient, mission-critical platforms.
• Building and maintaining key applications within the Payments portfolio.
• Maintaining core frameworks adopted across the enterprise.
• Defining best practices and design patterns (PCI DSS, cloud-native design, cell-based architectures, etc.).
• Reviewing architecture proposals for performance, security, resiliency, maintainability, and compliance.
• Serving as executive sponsor of the internal Golang Guild.
• Providing mentorship and indirect leadership to Staff and Principal Engineers through virtual teams.

Mar 2018 – Aug 2021 · 3 yrs 5 mos

• As a Principal Engineer, I am a Vice President level Engineer for the Card Payment Network. My focus is to build performance and resiliency within the payment network.
• Providing mentorship to Junior and Senior Engineers through one-to-ones and internal meetups
• Driving the design of a micro services and cloud native transaction processing platform.
• Working with infrastructure teams to build a platform designed for availability and performance
• Creating specialized transaction routing and load balancing applications in Golang
• Spearheading the adoption of a Service Mesh using open source tools such as Consul and Envoy
• Driving the adoption of gRPC and HTTP/2 within the core platform
• Pushing the adoption of application metrics collection via Prometheus
• Contributing to the creation of company wide Cloud Native practices and frameworks

Jan 2016 – Mar 2018 · 2 yrs 2 mos

• As a Staff Engineer I was a Director level infrastructure and software engineer. I lead a small team of 4-6 highly skilled Sr. Engineers who were acting in the capacity of an Architecture team. I was responsible for driving DevOps principles within the mission critical platforms team. I also owned the architecture for several applications within the Card Authorizations Network.
• Drove the adoption of the Drools Rules Engine for ATM transaction post processing
• Pushed Software Engineering best practices such as the adoption of Git Flow and TDD
• Helped create a Continuous Integration and Delivery solution using Jenkins and Docker
• Created an "infrastructure as code" based application deployment system using Docker and Saltstack
• Drove the creation of a transaction tracing capability using Splunk and Syslog
• Led a team evaluating programming languages for our core card payment network.
• Drove a practice of hands-free automated functional testing with developer notifications via Slack
• Member of an internal "High Speed Engineer" group. A group of selected engineers focused on pushing Open Source within American Express.

Oct 2011 – Jan 2016 · 4 yrs 3 mos

• As a Lead Technical Architect, I was a Infrastructure Architect. I was part of the mission critical platforms team. I was responsible for infrastructure running Card Authorizations and Manage File Transfer capabilities. Both of these platforms had availability requirements of 99.999% or higher.
• Designed a new internal hosting solution for the managed file transfer capability
• Evaluated several clustered/distributed filesystems choosing GPFS which enabled cross data-center clustering. This filesystem enables synchronous file writes across two data-centers
• Created several Highly Available Oracle database platforms using Oracle RAC and Golden Gate
• Evangelized the use of configuration management solutions such as SaltStack & Puppet
• Led the introduction of Splunk into the monitoring ecosystem for mission critical platforms
• Drove the design of an automatic DNS and IP based site failover for the Card Authorizations API
• Leader of several tiger teams focused on tuning and resolving long standing issues. This included identifying application performance issues and redesigning our Oracle database replication architecture