Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
LEADERSHIP & STRATEGIC ACHIEVEMENTS
Timeline
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Clément Siess

Eau Claire,WI

Summary

Strategic Lead Cloud Engineer with a focus on people leadership and architectural excellence. Proven track record of leading high-performing engineering teams through complex modernization efforts, including Kubernetes migrations and zero-downtime API transitions. Expert in fostering a culture of mentorship, managing vendor relationships, and aligning technical roadmaps with business strategy. Dedicated to developing engineering talent while driving operational efficiency and cloud reliability.

Overview

10
10
years of professional experience

Work History

LEAD CLOUD ENGINEER

Chick-fil-A
10.2025 - Current
  • Strategic Project Leadership: Directed and implemented the total rewrite of the Contacts-sync stack, moving from an obsolete system to a modern Java 25/Spring Boot 4 service on AWS ECS Fargate utilizing Microsoft Graph API.
  • Team Leadership: Lead the SRE and Cloud engineering functions, facilitating the onboarding of technical leads and managing the integration of external vendor partners.
  • Modernization Strategy: Spearheaded the re-architecture of core stacks from Elastic Beanstalk to Kubernetes, ensuring scalable and cost-effective containerized operations.
  • Operational Excellence: Implemented Blue/Green deployment strategies and custom reverse proxies to achieve zero-downtime transitions during legacy API deprecations.
  • Financial Stewardship: Reduced AWS operational costs through proactive resource optimization and strategic cloud migration planning.

Senior Cloud Engineer

Chick-fil-A
10.2023 - 10.2025
  • Spearheaded the development of the "Records" feature, leading the team in designing the architecture and front-end payloads.
  • Served as a Digital Fellow Rotation Leader, providing guidance and mentorship to a junior software engineer to foster their professional development.
  • Led project management and execution for the cloud and SRE team, overseeing all aspects of project delivery. This included defining implementation strategies, delegating tasks to team members based on their skill sets, providing guidance and mentorship through pair programming and collaborative problem-solving sessions, ensuring high-quality deliverables, and managing the testing process in coordination with QA resources.
  • Led the implementation of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, introducing innovative solutions like Datadog Workflows and Resilience4j to enhance system communication and reliability while standardizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) across multiple technology stacks.
  • Successfully led challenging transitions involving vendor-managed engineering resources and demonstrated the ability to provide technical performance feedback in a professional manner to a partner engineer.
  • Contributed to quarterly planning and budget discussions, advocating for resources to support the long-term health and scalability of the application.
  • Reduced AWS costs and revised cloud migration strategies to align with budget requirements.
  • Partnered with cross-functional teams (POSTX, Labor, Support Web, Beacon Team) to support application improvements and drive business growth.
  • Influenced and advocated for the creation of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with cross-functional teams (POSTX, Labor) to improve application support and ensure consistent service quality.

Solutions Architect

Big Nerd Ranch, Assigned to Chick-fil-A
07.2022 - 10.2023
  • Implemented i18n effort over multiple stacks.
  • Created more in-depth system documentation.
  • Impacted architecture decisions.
  • Reviewed Android PRs.

Senior Software Engineer

Big Nerd Ranch, Assigned to Chick-fil-A
10.2021 - 07.2022
  • Led two other cloud developers.
  • Converted CI/CD pipeline from Jenkins to GitHub Actions.
  • Designed Translation API to internationalize the @CFA Now app.
  • Optimized system performance by making proactive adjustments and resolving bugs.

Software Engineer

Big Nerd Ranch, Assigned to CFA
04.2021 - 10.2021
  • Maintained and develop new features for the @CFA Now and Wallboards apps to show restaurant owners and managers data to run their stores properly using Java, Spring, AWS, Python, and Angular.
  • Updated many stacks to the latest dependency versions and upgraded from Java 8 to Java 11.
  • Implemented Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) best practices to improve reliability and scalability.

Software Engineer

Menards
08.2016 - 04.2021
  • Rapidly advanced through four levels of software engineering roles, demonstrating a strong commitment to professional growth and a track record of exceeding expectations.
  • Programmed applications using Java object-oriented language with goals for code abstraction, stability, and reuse.
  • Re-architected and implemented the transaction lookup application for over 300 stores.
  • Determined project technical needs and coordinated specifications and requirements.
  • Created proof-of-concept prototype applications for demonstration and evaluation purposes (Angular, JPA, and Hibernate technology).
  • Mentored interns and new developers.

Education

Software Developer Associate Degree - Information Technology

Chippewa Valley Technical College
Eau Claire, WI
12.2015

Mobile Developer Associate Degree - Information Technology

Chippewa Valley Technical College
Eau Claire, WI
12.2015

Skills

    Proficient:

  • Software Development: Java, JPA/Hibernate, Spring, Python
  • AWS Serverless: AWS Lambda, AWS SQS, AWS SNS, DynamoDB
  • AWS Non-Serverless: AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS ECS, AWS ElastiCache
  • AWS Infrastructure/Devops: k8s, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudFront
  • CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Jenkins
  • Web Servers: Tomcat, Weblogic
  • Web Development: Angular, Typescript, PHP, JSP, WebSpeed

    • Familiar:

  • Web Development: React
  • Mobile Development: React Native, Swift, Kotlin

LEADERSHIP & STRATEGIC ACHIEVEMENTS

  • Team Mentorship & Growth: Directly mentored 5+ engineers and Digital Fellows, focusing on career pathing, technical "why" context, and professional development.
  • Vendor & Partner Management: Successfully led transitions for vendor-managed engineering resources, providing professional performance feedback and ensuring seamless knowledge transfer.
  • Strategic Planning: Actively contribute to quarterly planning and budget discussions, advocating for resource allocation that balances immediate delivery with long-term technical health.
  • Cross-Functional Influence: Orchestrated collaboration between POSTx, Labor, and Support teams to establish SLAs/SLOs and shared engineering standards.
  • Change Management: Led the team through major architectural shifts (Elastic Beanstalk to K8s) and technology adoptions (Java 25, Golang) with zero impact on system availability.

Timeline

LEAD CLOUD ENGINEER

Chick-fil-A
10.2025 - Current

Senior Cloud Engineer

Chick-fil-A
10.2023 - 10.2025

Solutions Architect

Big Nerd Ranch, Assigned to Chick-fil-A
07.2022 - 10.2023

Senior Software Engineer

Big Nerd Ranch, Assigned to Chick-fil-A
10.2021 - 07.2022

Software Engineer

Big Nerd Ranch, Assigned to CFA
04.2021 - 10.2021

Software Engineer

Menards
08.2016 - 04.2021

Software Developer Associate Degree - Information Technology

Chippewa Valley Technical College

Mobile Developer Associate Degree - Information Technology

Chippewa Valley Technical College
Clément Siess