Nicholas Baker
Summary
A seasoned Principal and Architect, I excel in designing complex cloud-native architectures and fostering team growth. My expertise in AWS, Scala, Java, Python, Typescript, and mentoring developers has significantly enhanced system efficiency and innovation. I'm recognized for my strategic vision and ability to bridge technology with business needs, ensuring impactful outcomes.
With a background in full-stack development, I have line-of-sight on potential points of friction within roadmaps and implementation plans.
I work closely with Product and Managers to produce the best outcomes while growing the competency and productivity of engineers.
Overview
29
29
years of professional experience
Work History
Lead Software Engineer
Southwest Airlines
04.2024 - Current
- Leading teams within the Flight Operations department to ingest real-time data into a Neptune graph database in a cloud-native deployment within AWS
- Working primarily in a leadership capacity with close interaction with product and management teams, with oversight of architecture and implementation
- Educating and mentoring developers to skill-up on modern Cloud Native technologies
- Introduced and trained teams on Typescript, Vitest, LocalStack, CDK, and Test Driven Development (TDD)
- Architected systems based on Event Sourcing, CQRS with DynamoDB, Kinesis, EventBridge and Typescript Lambdas
- Lead implementations to migrate away from a very expensive Java / Flink / JMS based applications to AWS native solutions, saving an estimated 1 million per year
- Improved observability and traceability of production systems to reduce MTTI, MTTR as well as accelerate new feature validation QA timeframes
Lead Software Engineer
E3 (FortiFi)
02.2019 - Current
- Lead a modernization project migrating from rack servers to AWS, AngularJS 1.5 to React/Typescript
- Introduced an inter-process service layer based on GRPC/Protobuf to enable the decomposition of their monolithic application
- Leveraged cloud-native solutions in AWS including Lambda, Step Functions, and Fargate
- Introduced and trained personnel on GraphQL for front-end data access
- Implemented Lending, Contract and Bonding implementations for the Florida market by refactoring the existing California-only backend systems to support modular rule sets
- Lead the implementation of Looker with a Star Schema data warehouse built using PySpark
Consulting Architect
The Contract Network
02.2024 - 04.2024
- Company Overview: Consulting Architect for an AI Startup leveraging ChatGPT to streamline contract negotiations
- Worked to scale-out architecture in preparation for public access
- Leveraging Step Functions, Lambdas, Event Sourcing and CloudFront
- Implemented new LLM Prompt-based implementations for previously custom algorithms
Principal Software Engineer
Wayfair
08.2021 - 01.2024
- Lead 3 teams as a Full-Stack Principal in the Supply Chain and ML Platform divisions
- Lead the modernization of a company-wide event data catalog with a Neo4J backend, GraphQL API and modern React front-end
- Worked across the organization to define and execute a Kafka to PubSub and Flink to Beam migration as part of a GCP cloud-native initiative
- Worked across the organization to formalize SLAs and SLOs for data via comprehensive metrics and Observability
- Collaborated with other Principals across the company to define and develop standards for Event data, Data Mesh and Data Catalog
Lead Software Engineer
TST
02.2020 - 08.2021
- Company Overview: TST is the Travel and Leisure provider for the AAA clubs
- Hired to be a change agent for technology, culture, and structure from a traditionally "flat" organization looking to scale 2x in the next year
- Responsibilities split between working with sprint teams on feature development and prototyping and educating teams on modern technologies such as Spark, GRPC, GraphQL, Kafaka, DataDog and Kubernetes
- Led efforts to quantify and improve the performance of existing services
- Introduced APM (DataDog) monitoring to their services, educated the teams on how to profile production services with JVM agents, and test performance at the algorithmic level via unit tests
- CPU and Memory utilization, caching and storage were all quantified and improved
Principal Software Engineer
Corvana (Now SugarCRM Discover)
01.2017 - 12.2019
- Company Overview: Late-stage founder for software startup working on a next-generation automated Business Insights platform as a SASS offering
- Initially focused on Sales and Marketing pipelines, various Machine Learning algorithms and statistical analysis were blended with historical and real-time datasets to generate actionable insights
- Responsible for defining and contributing to the design implementation of all areas of the application from front to back
- Migrated existing POC from Dropwizard to Play Framework and Scala
- Lead the rollout of Silhouette SAML Security, Sangria GraphQL and GRPC.
- Key contributor to custom query engine built on Redshift and later transitioned to Greenplum
- Author of the Insights Engine and many of the ML and Statistical Insights generated by the product
- Introduced Apollo GraphQL, React Routing, Undo, HOCs to the web application
- Sophisticated Webpack code-splitting enabling pluggable per-tenant code
- Authored Pivot Table based on React Virtualized, several interactive D3 visualizations, custom React-Bootstrap components
- Authored a fully Streaming architecture leveraging Akka Streaming, Websockets and GraphQL Subscriptions
Platform Architect
Pentaho / Hitachi HDS
01.2014 - 12.2017
- Company Overview: Responsible for the overall evolution of the Pentho BI Platform, developed by 10 Sprint teams with over 180 developers spread out over 4 continents
- Pentaho is a combination of Open Source and Enterprise software and as such required a delicate balancing between enterprise and open features
- This was enabled by a powerful modular architecture
- I worked closely with the Project Management team, advising and aiding in the development of the Platform roadmap and helping translate those into delivery plans for the development teams
- I authored design specifications for new features and prototyped upcoming work to reduce risk and accelerate development timelines
- I worked closely with Sprint teams to implement, test, and document new features
- In preparation for new releases, I helped educate the Support and Services teams on the implementation details of new features
- I was often involved with customer engagements, where I lent my expertise for rapid diagnosis and remediation of issues
- I was also the Engineering point-person working with the automation team to implement performance testing for benchmarks and regression detection
- Responsible for the overall evolution of the Pentho BI Platform, developed by 10 Sprint teams with over 180 developers spread out over 4 continents
- Replaced various home-grown plugin architectures with OSGI
- Authored Spring extensions to support rich plugin environment, configurability and developer productivity
- Delivered Reactive Streams implementation of the Kettle ETL engine running on top of Spark in Yarn
- Solved critical functional and performance issues across the product offering
- Transitioned many client-side applications to standardized AMD/RequireJS stack with a custom RequireJS/WebJars loader for OSGI environment
- Rewrote our pivot table and numerous visualizations in the latest version of Dojo
- Managed the migration from custom Ant/Ivy build system to Maven
- Incorporated leading enterprise libraries, replacing old or custom solutions: Camel, CXF, ActiveMQ, Distributed RPC
- Fabric8 Kubernetes on OpenShift
Lead Developer
Pentaho
01.2010 - 12.2014
- Contributed across all sprint teams helping them understand requirements, formulate implementation strategies, and following them all the way to release
- Responsible for understanding the entire product stack, keeping an eye out for release risks, regressions, and ensuring resources and development timelines were orchestrated as optimally as possible
- As the key Subject Matter Expert, I advised Support, Services, and Documentation teams on release changes
- Lead migration from SVN to GIT, defining development branching practice, educating large development team, and helping Dev-Ops transition the build and other systems
- JMeter and WebDriver for automated testing
- Karma/Jasmine unit testing for Javascript codebase
- Definition of Developer Standards and practices
- Upgrade from Dojo 0.4 to 1.6 refactoring build to AMD/RequireJS
Lead UI Developer
Pentaho
01.2007 - 12.2010
- Originally hired as a UI developer, knowledgeable in web development, design along with strong Java development skills including Swing and SWT
- My main responsibilities outside of delivering product was to mentor and educate a large group of developers with little to no experience in UI and Web development as well as develop libraries and frameworks to shorten development times, enforce standards and lower the bar for developers to be productive
- Authored a UI framework based on the XUL interface language which allowed Java programs written with it to run in Swing, SWT and in the Browser with GWT without requiring recompilation
- Developed extensions to GWT enabling pluggable custom UI code
- Delivered first mobile version of Pentaho based on Sencha Touch with custom extensions to support interactivity
CEO/Developer
Local Web
01.2005 - 12.2007
- Company Overview: Independent contractor developing solutions for companies across Florida
- Most work done in support next-gen SIP Telecommunications products (Competitor to Google Voice) developed in Python with other backend systems written in C# and Java
- PHP MVC architecture to enable rapid, testable and stable development
- Independent contractor developing solutions for companies across Florida
Lead Software Developer
Z88.3
01.2002 - 12.2005
- Developed custom Donor Management System with ACH and Credit-Card payment support, written in PHP and DHTML
- Check Scanning module written in C# employing OCR and barcode scanning to automate payments
- Fundraising/Campaign System fully integrated between Asterisk SIP Call-center and Donor System
- Streaming Server system written in C# integrating with Windows Media Server technology
- DHTML Web Players displaying custom metadata injected into Audio Stream (Highlighted by Microsoft with the launch of Windows Media 9)
- Infrastructure monitoring software for SNMP modules with Mobile alerts and Web Dashboards
- Intelligent modules monitoring sensors and performing automated actions (Transmitter failover, etc.)
Contract Developer
ACS (Atlanta)
01.2001 - 12.2002
- Contracted to develop Swing-based Java applications for Medicare Administration
- Educated and mentored several developers switching from Visual Basic to Java
Developer
LiquidGolf.com
01.1999 - 12.2001
- Originally hired as a graphic designer, I quickly transitioned into a development role working with ASP 2.0, Javascript/HTML/CSS and SQL (SQL Server and Oracle 9i)
Graphic Designer
Electronic Data Systems (EDS)
01.1996 - 12.1999
- Worked as a Graphic Designer as part of the Newtrend Banking Software division
- In addition to print and multimedia, I was responsible for the introduction of public and internal websites and served as the Webmaster for a division of 400
Education
BA - Music
UCF
01.1999
High School -
University High
01.1995
Skills
- Architecture, Organization and Strategy
- Coordinating with non-technical departments and customers
- Scala
- Java
- Python
- Typescript
- React
- Functional Programming
- Reactive Systems Design
- API Design
- Data Pipelines
- Analytic datastores
- Full-Stack Architecture
- Cloud-native Architecture
- AWS CDK
- Serverless
- Lambdas
- Step Functions
- EventBridge
- Kinesis
- DynamoDB
- RDS
- Athena
- Neptune
- Redshift
- Kubernetes
- Helm
- GCP
- Datadog
- Kafka
- PubSub
- Flink
- Beam
- Spark
- OSGI
- GRPC
- GraphQL
- REST
- BigQuery
- Neo4J
- MongoDB
- Postgres
- Hazelcast
- Redis
- Hibernate
- NodeJS
- ExpressJS
- Webpack
- Storybook
- JEST
- Vitest
- Unit testing
- Integration testing
- Automation testing
- Load testing
- Selenium
- Webdriver
- ScalaMeter
- JMeter
- Gatling
- Agile methodologies
- CI/CD
Timeline
Lead Software Engineer
Southwest Airlines
04.2024 - Current
Consulting Architect
The Contract Network
02.2024 - 04.2024
Principal Software Engineer
Wayfair
08.2021 - 01.2024
Lead Software Engineer
TST
02.2020 - 08.2021
Lead Software Engineer
E3 (FortiFi)
02.2019 - Current
Principal Software Engineer
Corvana (Now SugarCRM Discover)
01.2017 - 12.2019
Platform Architect
Pentaho / Hitachi HDS
01.2014 - 12.2017
Lead Developer
Pentaho
01.2010 - 12.2014
Lead UI Developer
Pentaho
01.2007 - 12.2010
CEO/Developer
Local Web
01.2005 - 12.2007
Lead Software Developer
Z88.3
01.2002 - 12.2005
Contract Developer
ACS (Atlanta)
01.2001 - 12.2002
Developer
LiquidGolf.com
01.1999 - 12.2001
Graphic Designer
Electronic Data Systems (EDS)
01.1996 - 12.1999
BA - Music
UCF
High School -
University High
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