SUMMARY

Senior engineering leader with extensive experience designing and delivering enterprise applications, distributed systems, modernization initiatives, and cloud-native platforms. Expertise spans Java, Quarkus, Spring Boot, Golang, Kubernetes, DevOps, observability, and full-stack application architecture. Known for leading technical direction, mentoring engineers, improving delivery practices, and partnering across teams to execute complex platform and product initiatives. AI-forward, with hands-on proof-of-concept work in LangChain4j, MCP, Quarkus-based agent patterns, GitHub agent skills, and AI-assisted development workflows.

WORK EXPERIENCE

SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER, McGraw Hill - 2025 - Present

• Provide technical leadership for an agile team delivering full-stack solutions, LTIA integrations, and strategic platform initiatives for both public-facing and internal applications.

• Drive adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices across the SDLC by evaluating and integrating tools and workflows including GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, GitHub AI agents, and Quarkus/LangChain4j-based agent and MCP POCs.

• Design and prototype AI-enabled solutions that improve engineering workflows, developer productivity, and internal innovation, with a focus on practical agent-based development patterns.

• Lead platform migration strategy and execution, aligning architecture, implementation, rollout, and operational readiness across teams.

• Drive cross-team design and delivery of scalable backend, integration, and application solutions using Java 21, Spring Boot 3, Go, and Angular 21.

• Contribute to integration architecture and secure interoperability across LTIA, Canvas, Blackboard, and JWT-based authorization workflows.

• Strengthen platform reliability and production visibility through observability practices, leveraging Datadog and New Relic to support monitoring, troubleshooting, performance analysis, and operational insight.

• Serve as an engineering escalation point for complex customer and production issues, leading root-cause analysis and implementation of durable corrective actions.

• Mentor engineers through onboarding, product domain guidance, technical coaching, and participation in the interview process.

• Promote engineering excellence through technical demos, proof-of-concepts, knowledge transfer, and collaboration around modern application architecture, AI-assisted development, and platform evolution.

LEAD SOFTWARE ENGINEER, AGO Insurance Software — 2004-2024

• System Development: Designed full-stack, micro-service and monolith solutions for policy issuance, agent commissions, billing, and claims processing.

  • Quarkus and Spring Boot (GraphQL and RESTful services), Payara Micro and Full, Node.js
  • Angular with PrimeNG single-page application, JavaServer Faces
  • MongoDB, Redis, and Microsoft SQL Server
  • Docker stacks and Kubernetes for both on-premise and cloud deployments

• Code, Standards and Testing: Conducted code reviews; enforced coding and testing standards to ensure engineering excellence.

  • SonarQube code analysis with JaCoCo code coverage
  • JUnit, Mockito, REST Assured, Integration Testing

• Document Processing: Engineered a multi-threaded Java document generation service using LibreOffice UNO for template processing, enhancing service concurrency across print, email, and imaging.

• Security Practices: Implemented standard security practices.

  • Java Security API, OpenID Connect (JWT)
  • Keycloak and Amazon Cognito (Amplify)

• DevOps Leadership: Built and maintained internal DevOps stack; enforced best practices for development and QA teams; managed product releases.

  • GitLab CI/CD, Nexus (Maven & Docker), SonarQube, Postfix, Draw.io, Ngnix

• Architectural Proficiency: Familiar with monolithic applications, distributed micro-services, single-page applications, event processing, fault tolerance, and cloud-native design.

  • ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, SNS, SQS, Kubernetes, Docker containers, service mesh and Gateway API
  • Cloud-native and native-binary Quarkus services
  • Smallrye and MicroProfile Fault Tolerance (Quarkus), Resilience4j (Spring Boot), load balancing

• Legacy Application Management: Led maintenance and migration of legacy applications (VB, JSF) to a modern architecture and technology stack; monolith decomposition; Data migration and modeling.

• Collaboration: Engaged with clients and business analysts on product features, issue resolution, data migration, and b2b integrations.

• Mentorship and Leadership: Provided technology guidance, mentored developers, participated in candidate selection, and oversaw technical onboarding. Coordinated tasks among developers and managed product release cycles.

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INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR — 2003-2024

Engineer products based on Java, LAMP, Node.js, MongoDB, Kubernetes.

Buffalo Head Media

• CMS for reporting and investigating on regional events
• Node.js, Hapi.js, MongoDB, Aurelia, Bootstrap
• Deployed on Linode Kubernetes cluster

University of Scranton, Information Security Office

• A Splunk integrated data-mining system that imports and correlates DHCP, NAT, and NAC events into a concise and unified framework
• Multi-threaded Java parser of Splunk records, integrated as a FreeBSD daemon, with customized import requirements, such as timing and event sources
• Java EE web app for manual identity tasks, record browsing and reporting, utilized by existing network monitoring tools for automated mediation

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PROGRAMMER ANALYST, MetLife — 2000-2002

• Engineered Agency Commissions system: a first of its kind at MetLife that reduced commission data distribution costs by 90%, eliminated mailing quarterly commission data CDs
• Member of production response team
• Analysis and consolidation of redundant applications
• Develop IIS applications with Visual Basic Web Classes and MTS

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Skills Summary

Focus	Technology
AI	AI-assisted engineering, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, GitHub AI agents, Quarkus/LangChain4j Agents and MCP
Languages	Java, Javascript, Typescript, Python, PHP, bash, HTML, CSS, Go
Java	Java 8-21, Java Enterprise (EE), Maven, Quarkus, Spring Boot, RESTful API, GraphQL, OpenAPI, MicroProfile, JavaServer Faces, JAX-RS, JAX-WS (WSDL), JPA, EclipseLink, Hibernate, and more
Javascript/Frontend	Node.js, Hapi.js, Mongoose ORM, Express.js, Angular, PrimeNG, Aurelia, Webpack, Bootstrap, jQuery, JSON
Testing	REST Assured, Mockito, JUnit, Lab.js, Integration Testing, SonarQube, JaCoCo
Docker/Kubernetes	Containerization, Docker Compose, Docker Desktop, Kubernetes, EKS, Istio, Gateway API, Cilium, Kind, minikube, Vagrant, Linode
Servers/Platforms	Payara/Glassfish, Apache, Redis/Valkey, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, JasperReports, Kestra, Kafka, Linux, MacOS, Netbeans, IntelliJ IDEA, VSCode
Design	Agile methodologies, microservices architecture, messaging (websockets, SSE, backend queues & pub/sub), fault tolerance, data modeling, single-page applications, UI design, monolith decomposition, problem-solving skills, detail oriented, business integrations
Resilency	Event Orchestration, SmallRye / MicroProfile Fault Tolerance, Resilience4j, scalable services
Observability	Datadog, New Relic, and SmallRye Metrics/Metering
AWS	API Gateway, Cognito, Lambdas, EKS, Boto3, DocumentDB, DynamoDB, SNS, SQS, Bedrock (training)
DevOps	git, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub, CI scripting, pipeline automation, Jenkins, Sonatype Nexus
Security	Kubernetes Secrets, Keycloak, OpenID Connect, Amazon Cognito, Java Security
Data	Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, Redis/Valkey, MySQL, DocumentDB, DynamoDB, S3, Postgres, SQL, JPQL

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EDUCATION & CERTIFICATIONS

• Bachelor of Science, Computer Science — University of Scranton, Scranton, PA, 2001
• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) (Credly) — Amazon, Expires January 2028
• Kubernetes Certified Application Developer (pre-cert training) — Udemy
• AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 (pre-cert training) — Udemy
• Notable Udemy courses: Red Hat OpenShift, Apache Kafka, Terraform/OpenTofu, LLMs