Career History
Best Egg
Wilmington, DE
Director of Software Engineering I
- Start Date:
- February 2022
- Served as tech lead for a cross-functional team
- Worked closely with a product manager, UX designers/researchers, frontend and backend engineers, and data analysts to focus on our product offers and conversion experience
- Led standups and managed our team's Jira board with the assistance of our delivery managers
- Coordinated UAT testing activities and product releases
- Provided technical feasibility analysis during product discovery, created technical designs for new features, and developed and implementation plan using available team resources to quickly deliver on new features and functionality
- Lead the initial build-out and development of a brand new product
- Was part of the initial team to launch our Vehicle Equity Loan product, managing the frontend development
- Worked closely with product owners and UX to ensure project scope was reasonable to meet target dates
- Coordinated with backend engineers on the end-to-end product solution
- Onboarded and managed four new direct reports
- Managed frontend engineers across a variety of product teams
- Set annual goals and performed yearly evaluations with direct reports
- Provided formal and informal mentorship opportunities with junior engineers
- Lead the frontend development of our personal loan application site
- Managed a small team of developers to maintain and add new features to an Angular 12+ application
- Tackled tech debt but ensuring we were using the current LTS version of Angular
- Contributed to the Angular frontend codebase and Python/Django backend codebase
- Lead the frontend development of our credit card application site
- Managed a small team of developers to maintain existing and add new features to an Angular 12+ application
- Improved developer experience by creating a local dev-only backend to mock out the credit card application process and data
- Worked closely with senior backend engineers on new feature development
- Coordinated a rebrand of the entire project with the frontend team
- Designed and refactored the application to make use of our in-house digital analytics solution
Senior Software Engineer
- Start Date:
- April 2021
- End Date:
- February 2022
- Lead the development of the next generation version of our internal agent desktop application
- Worked closely with product owners and operations specialists on refining requirements
- Wrote clean, maintainable, well-tested code in Angular 11+ and Angular Material
- Created a mock backend in NodeJS/Express/MongoDB for ease in local development and testing
- Mentored junior engineers on coding best practices
- Coordinated with backend engineers on API contracts
- Added several new features to our customer service website
- Worked with backend engineers and product owners to implement statement and payoff quote PDF downloads
- Increased unit test coverage within the code base
- Discovered and catalogued web accessibility issues, enabling other frontend developers to improve the overall accessibility of the customer service website
Elsevier, Inc.
Philadelphia, PA
Senior Software Engineer
- Start Date:
- October 2018
- End Date:
- April 2021
- Senior UI engineer for ClinicalKey, an online library for physicians and nurses
- Provided maintenance and added new features to an existing AngularJS (1.x) and NodeJS/Express application
- Increased unit test coverage within the code bases over 100%
- Wrote accessible, cross-browser code, compatible with versions of IE7 or later
- Integrated with several in-house platform APIs including APIs for authentication, search functionality, and content delivery
- Performed the role of Tech Lead for a cross-functional team
- Regularly coordinated with product, UX, delivery management, and QA leads to define requirements for epics/stories
- Identified external dependencies and communicated with dependency leads on requirements and timelines
- Lead stand-ups and UI team planning meetings/refinement sessions
- Provided continuing mentorship for junior- and mid-level developers
- Frequently paired with less-senior engineers on both defining requirements and implementing stories
- Lead several "mob coding" sessions for the UI team, facilitating a quick way to cross-train on new skills
- Provided constructive feedback on code reviews
- Migrated ClinicalKey's build and development tooling from Grunt to Webpack
- Integrated modern-day build tooling into our aging, 5+ year-old code base, allowing the team to make use of ES6+ JavaScript features and React components (through a React2Angular library).
- Decreased build time and bundle size by upgrading, providing for quicker development and deploys, and a decreased initial load time for our customers
- Worked closely with dev-ops and QA engineers to ensure switching build tools did not affect our deployment process or negatively impact customers
- Lead the integration of Adobe Target, an A/B testing application, in ClinicalKey and other products in the business unit
- Replaced an existing (and preferred) A/B testing tool with Adobe Target, which was the company-mandated solution for A/B testing.
- Performed discovery work on how to use the tool, writing detailed documentation for engineers and product team members.
- Cross-trained teams for other products on implementing and using the tool
- Developed a Chrome extension which provided tooling for working with ClinicalKey, for both engineers and non-engineers alike
- Created an extension that allows quick access to ClinicalKey's various environments, editions, and sub-products
- Internally shared the extension, which is currently used by other ClinicalKey developers and product team members
- Wrote the tool with Typescript and React as a way to learn (and maintain previous learning) on these technologies, while also providing a benefit to my and others' work
Dorado Systems, LLC
Haddonfield, NJ
Software Engineer
- Start Date:
- October 2016
- End Date:
- September 2018
- Worked on an existing Javascript (NodeJS & jQuery), Java and MySQL web-based terminal emulator
- Became a subject matter expert on the application shortly after starting
- Made many code reliability improvements that reduced errors that were occurring several times daily to zero
- Ensured that the application was cross-browser compatible through IE9
- Designed and developed a single page application web portal using React
- Created clean, well-documented React components using Jest and Enzyme for unit testing
- Incorporated Redux to handle managing application state
- Educated other members of the team on React and Javascript through lunch-and-learns and wiki posts
- Developed Maven-based Java 8 microservices with Spring Boot and a Postgresql data layer
- Wrote well-documented, well-tested code (with JUnit and Mockito)
- Simplified logic by using AWS Lambas and Step Functions to handle asynchronous response delivery via SFTP
- Made use of Apache Commons Pool to better utilize our connections with Medicare's CMS mainframe system
- Created an integration testing platform for testing our Java microservices, using Docker, Docker-Compose, and Terraform
- Wrote scripts to bring up a local copy of an entire service (or product) stack, closely mirroring the infrastructure of higher environments
- Wrote integration tests on this platform using the NodeJS Chakram testing framework
- Served as an evangelist for the new testing platform, educating other developers (most of whom had minimal Javascript experience) in writing tests and using/enhancing the platform
- Worked in a team environment using state of the art tools and processes:
- Was involved with the entire development lifecycle, from initial design, development, code review, testing, automated deployment and application performance monitoring
- Proficient with tools such as Git, Jenkins, Fisheye/Crucible, Rancher, Kibana, and New Relic
- Regularly mentored other developers through weekly one-on-one meetings
Red Spark (formerly 50onRed)
Philadelphia, PA
CMS Developer
- Start Date:
- September 2015
- End Date:
- October 2016
- Created and managed 10 viral content and marketing sites in WordPress, serving over 100K pageviews/day.
- Improved page performance by putting the content sites behind Akamai’s CDN, cutting down page load times, and increasing session length and pages per session.
- Developed the company’s current marketing website, transforming designer PSD images into a high-quality, custom-made, responsive WordPress theme, utilizing Twig templating (to separate presentation from business logic), SASS CSS pre- processing, and jQuery.
- Wrote clean, unit-tested PHP code while developing custom WordPress plugins, including an A/B testing plugin allowing our team to choose more effective page layouts, ultimately increasing our ad impressions by a factor of six.
Software Engineering Intern
- Start Date:
- June 2015
- End Date:
- September 2015
- Wrote HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and Python code to contribute to one of the companies core products, a native ad optimizer, which served 5 million impressions daily.
- Created MusicBot, a Python Slack bot for in-office music, and easily one of the most active Slack integrations in the company, handling over 400 actions a day.
Various New Jersey public schools
Southern New Jersey
Music Teacher
- Start Date:
- September 2003
- End Date:
- June 2015
- Served as a music teacher in various elementary, middle and high schools in Southern New Jersey
- Taught band, chorus, orchestra, classroom/general music, guitar, and music technology
- Taught students in grades 3 through 12
- Programmed and conducted annual winter and spring concerts for band, orchestra, and chorus