Mark Brankin
Dallas
Summary
Solutions Architect with extensive experience in leading cross-functional teams to design and implement scalable web applications. Expertise in cloud technologies and C#, focused on creating reusable tooling and enhancing project efficiency for high-quality outcomes.
Overview
9
9
years of professional experience
Work History
Solutions Architect
Crossvale, Inc.
01.2025 - Current
- In my role as a Solutions Architect, I have been responsible for leading a team of 8, including 6 developers, a business analyst and a UX designer in the delivery of two key projects which required design in a wide range of areas, including UI Design, Containerization, UI Component reusability, Microservice REST APIs, CICD Pipelines and RDBMS Schema Design.
- At the client, my key objective was to build out a system which not only scaled in performance as more modules came online, but also to build a reusable and consistent set of tooling which could be used across the platform to deliver consistent results at a fast rate.
Senior Consultant
Crossvale, Inc.
08.2024 - Current
- In my role as a Senior Consultant, I was on the team which delivered two key projects for the bank. My key objective was to deliver high-quality, robust and readable code on time.
- Designed and delivered a Debit Card API project for the bank’s online banking system, which integrated with both TSYS and Code Connect P1D in parallel to fit the bank’s particular needs while being as performant as possible.
- Helped design and deliver a new complaints system for the bank including a rich BPM-driven rules-based task workflow for complaints based on classification.
- Built out GitOps pipelines for new REST APIs with ArgoCD and kustomize.
- Built out a “dead-letter queue” onto an Apache Kafka topic which fed into Grafana alerts which could notify bank employees of partial successes if one of the two integrated systems had a problem.
Project Lead
Trintech Inc
11.2023 - 08.2024
- As a project lead, my role was to lead a team of four high-performing developers in a “lab” – brainstorming, designing, prototyping and ultimately handing off new features and ideas to development teams.
- In this role, I used the most cutting-edge technologies to help the company modernize and stay ahead of the curve.
- Designed and oversaw the implementation of an LLM-based Support Assistant, functioning as an internal ChatGPT for support personnel, with retrieval-augmented generation to integrate company data into responses.
- Deployed the application to Azure Kubernetes Service through Azure Container Registry.
- Enabled real-time streaming updates akin to ChatGPT functionality using Microsoft SignalR.
- Integrated the solution with Azure OpenAI Service using .NET Semantic Kernel, a cutting-edge .NET library for LLM-related use cases.
- Integrated with company Okta SSO to enable secure authentication and role-based access for users and admins.
- Stored conversation threads in MongoDB documents, handling large volumes of unstructured data.
- Built out reactive user interface using Angular capable of being used on Mobile and Desktop Screens.
- Guaranteed full code test coverage by utilizing appropriate unit test frameworks and automating tests with Playwright.
- Facilitated collaboration among Documentation, Salesforce, and Training teams to efficiently consolidate data from various sources.
- Created automated processing pipelines to process, cleanse, tag, and vectorize data from various sources including Salesforce and internal help sites using Python scripts for functionality, and orchestrating with Azure Devops Pipelines for commit-based or time-based triggering as appropriate.
- Stored vectorized documents in ChromaDB, a fast vector database for contextual lookup.
- Worked closely with company Senior Leadership including CTO and CFO.
Technical Lead
Trintech Inc
07.2017 - 11.2023
- As Technical Lead, I assumed technical leadership for the Journal Entry module of Trintech’s Cadency application, a legacy financial software suite built on .NET Framework and deployed to Windows VMs.
- The application automates journal entries and financial reporting, integrating with major ERP systems like SAP S/4 HANA, NetSuite, and Oracle ERP to streamline financial operations.
- Advanced from intern to Technical Lead, orchestrating project lifecycles, managing code reviews, and collaborating closely with product owners to refine and prioritize development stories.
- Championed the modernization of legacy systems, transitioning to an Angular frontend and .NET REST APIs backend.
- Rearchitected the software deployment by developing CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps, reducing deployment times and increasing release stability.
- Created patch pipelines which deployed only what is necessary for a hotfix, reducing patching times from 1+ hours to, in some cases, 4 minutes.
- Implemented SonarQube for automated static code analysis, which helped bring the average number of bugs released down by 40%.
- Reengineered database structures in MSSQL to optimize performance for the highest load of the largest customers, reducing required maintenance intervals.
- Architected, implemented, and coordinated with ops teams a migration of hundreds of terabytes of customer file attachments to AWS S3 storage from inside the MSSQL database; this operation was executed flawlessly, reducing database backup sizes by up to 97%.
- Innovated a custom Java-based query optimizer for Cadency’s third party BI tool that improved report generation efficiency by up to 90x, making previously unusably slow reports for the largest customers run adequately.
- Developed a custom database 'scanner' tool to audit database customizations from previously on-prem installations, helping to find problems, for consistent upgrades and reducing downtime during deployment cycles.
- Spearheaded the adoption of LoadNinja for performance testing, significantly enhancing the scalability and reliability of the Cadency application under peak load conditions.
Education
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer -
Linux Academy
01-2024
Bachelor of Computer Science - First Class Honors
Queen’s University Belfast
01-2019
Skills
- C#
- Java
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- SQL Server
- PostGreSQL
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- Waterfall
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- OpenShift
- Keycloak
- 3Scale
- Quarkus
- Kogito
- Angular
- ASPNET
- NET MVC
- SignalR
- Kustomize
- GitOps
- Helm
- Kafka
Timeline
Solutions Architect
Crossvale, Inc.
01.2025 - Current
Senior Consultant
Crossvale, Inc.
08.2024 - Current
Project Lead
Trintech Inc
11.2023 - 08.2024
Technical Lead
Trintech Inc
07.2017 - 11.2023
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer -
Linux Academy
Bachelor of Computer Science - First Class Honors
Queen’s University Belfast