Gary Rainwater
Lucas
Summary
Engineering Director with over 20 years of experience in software design and development. Expertise in creating and maintaining core infrastructure, web, mobile, and desktop applications for Fortune 100 companies. Holder of two approved patents and one pending patent for innovative technical solutions. Proven leadership in managing teams of up to 40 engineers and instrumental in establishing a new IT office in Plano, TX, successfully recruiting over 900 professionals.
Overview
19
19
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
IT Director
United Services Automobile Association (USAA)
Plano
01.2020 - 01.2025
- As director of application infrastructure at USAA I’m responsible for 30+ software engineers and the management lifecycle and continued support of our OpenShift (Containers) and Kafka environments.
- Along with managing the engineers and leaders that report to me I am also responsible for working closely with our product owners and stakeholders across the enterprise to prioritize objectives and deliverables, mitigate risk, manage technical debt and coordinate migrations and upgrades across all client applications.
- Designed and Implemented a home grown product called 'Scoop' to automate technical debt mitigation.
- Implemented a slack bot that consumed technical documentation from internal Box and Wiki to provide automated Q&A to developers across the enterprise.
- Partnered with teams across the enterprise to migrated over 2000 applications from OpenShift 3 to OpenShift 4 in nine months.
- Personally tracked and reported to our CTO and CIO our adoption metrics for our platforms and progress on technical debt mitigation.
- When I joined the team it was underperforming in key metrics including point delivery, platform downtime and time to detect.
IT Technical ARCHITECT
United Services Automobile Association (USAA)
Plano
01.2015 - 01.2020
- As a technical architect at USAA I’ve been the domain architect for the Internal Communication domain which encompasses technologies that provide capabilities in support of enterprise video, enterprise social, digital signage, enterprise search, intranet and corporate communication tools.
- Retired over a million dollars with of Cisco hardware that was soon to be end of life in 2022.
- Evaluated and selected Salesforce Chatter for our internal social re-platform and saved over 500k in custom development.
- Corporate events team committed to live streaming the annual members meeting and sent out over 2 million invitations to member to view live from the web.
- Completed a multi-vendor enterprise search tech evaluation and selected Coveo as our platform.
- Completed multi-vendor enterprise video technical evaluation to select a conference streaming and video on demand solution.
IT Technical Manager
United Services Automobile Association (USAA)
San Antonio
01.2011 - 01.2015
- As a technical manager at USAA I had the opportunity to lead several integral and talented infrastructure teams including connectivity infrastructure focusing on key backbone services to our online products.
- One of my greatest achievements as a manager was opening the Plano office as one of the first four managers along with 16 developers.
- Pushed an innovation effort in Plano using the talented resources on my team to develop 'Hacker Tracker'.
- Partnered with multiple leaders across all LOBs to usher in Adaptive Web and Wicket in place of Presentation Services.
- Recruited at as many as 4 universities in a single semester and sat on several curriculum advisory panels.
SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER
United Services Automobile Association (USAA)
San Antonio
01.2010 - 01.2011
- As a software engineer at USAA I have had the opportunity to take several leadership roles which have allowed me to demonstrate my ability to create solutions to very challenging problems.
- As the technical lead in a partnership effort with Microsoft to bring the USAA mobile application to the Windows Phone 7 platform.
- Presented at the first every USAA Developer Convention specifically on the Windows Phone 7 platform.
- Managed several offshore resources to reduce the number of the mobile infrastructure change requests by over 70%.
- Handled contract negotiations, and worked with USAA procurement and legal departments to finalize the renewals and purchases of vendor solutions.
senior software engineer / team lead
American Airlines
Fort Worth
01.2007 - 01.2010
- Project management specialist leading six in-house and three offshore staff in developing applications to support the organization’s capacity planning initiatives.
- Missed flight connections for crew members equate to millions of dollars in loss for the airline industry.
- Took ownership of a project to convert an existing aircraft routing application in C to a Java framework.
- Coordinated with our business partners to develop an idea to reduce scheduling time.
senior object oriented developer consultant
Walt Disney World
Orlando
01.2006 - 01.2007
- Initially recruited to help design and develop the architecture to ensure Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.
- Co-led the effort to comply with PCI standards to put all of the Parks and Resorts products in compliance before the deadline.
- Created the initial reporting framework for the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online business team.
Education
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
Corpus Christi, TXCertificate in Entrepreneurship Program -
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, TXSkills
- IT Strategy
- Cost Benefit Analysis
- Vendor Management
- Project Management
- Resource Management
- Effective Communicator
- Software Development & Management
- Technology Evaluation & Deployment
- Team Leadership
- AWS Certified Professional
- Solution & Domain Architecture
- Java/J2EE
- C#
- Python
- Android Mobile
- React w/Redux
Certification
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, 01/01/19
- AWS Certified Architect Associate Exam, 03/01/20
- DCA Certification, 01/01/20
- Certified Project Manager Professional, PMP, 01/01/09 - 12/31/13
Professional Memberships
- Customer Council for Kaltura, 01/01/17 - 12/31/19
- Customer Council for Panopto, 01/01/17 - 12/31/19
- UT Dallas Curriculum Advisory Board, 01/01/14 - 12/31/17
- Toastmasters, 01/01/11 - Present
- Phi Theta Kappa - National Collegiate Honor Society
Timeline
IT Director
United Services Automobile Association (USAA)
01.2020 - 01.2025
IT Technical ARCHITECT
United Services Automobile Association (USAA)
01.2015 - 01.2020
IT Technical Manager
United Services Automobile Association (USAA)
01.2011 - 01.2015
SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER
United Services Automobile Association (USAA)
01.2010 - 01.2011
senior software engineer / team lead
American Airlines
01.2007 - 01.2010
senior object oriented developer consultant
Walt Disney World
01.2006 - 01.2007
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
Certificate in Entrepreneurship Program -
Southern Methodist University