James Gifford

My job as tech lead is to continue to write code (Ruby on Rails, Elasticsearch, PHP, MySQL, Angular and React), but with the added responsibilities of representing the team to management (I report directly to the VP of Engineering), vetting our plans for feature delivery, dealing with many of the details of our project management process, as well as assisting with the departments technical roadmap. These include things such as:

• Establishing common technical vision for the projects and applications
• Coordinating with product stakeholders on scope
• Coordinating with QA leadership and teams to help ensure quality of work
• Assisting product owners with technical product requirements
• Technical architecture and design
• Working with knowledge experts on the technical details of features
• Leading daily stand ups and weekly sprint plannings
• Representing the team to management from a technical perspective as well as representing management to the team from a business perspective

Projects led:

• Building smarter algorithms for listing search.
  • Previously, it was pure chance what listings would show up on the first page. Now, it's smarter and takes things like location, good behavior metrics and similarity to listings that have booked into account.
  • Technologies worked with include dynamic scripting and calculations inside Elasticsearch queries, Segment event tracking and AWS Redshift data warehousing.
• Switching payment gateways and processors. This was a multi-quarter initiative that involved:
  • Extracting existing payment processing code from legacy code (PHP) into a new, modern test covered code base (Ruby).
  • Working with product to understand and make changes to the customer onboarding experience.
  • Working with finance to understand the finance and accounting process changes required to make the transition.
  • Leading and participating in technical design discussions with multidisciplinary teams.

Lead Developer:

Lead the development of a custom-built ecommerce platform for the commercial printing industry.

Stack:

• Ruby on Rails
• PostgreSQL
• Sidekiq
• Elasticsearch

Projects:

• Refactoring complex logic to be thread safe
• Creating automated deployment tool chain (deploys were by hand previously)
• Leading rewrite of application to be mobile-friendly and improve performance 5x.

Responsibilities include:

• Writing code to solve business problems
• Ensuring code quality via code review
• Finding and managing contractors
• Selecting vendors and technologies that suit our needs
• Business requirement gathering for features
• Coordinating with other departments internally for prioritizing features and bug fixes
• Leading an Agile team using a variant of Kanban

DevOps:

Tools used include:

• Ubuntu Server
• Configuration Managment (Ansible)
• Monitoring and Alerting Toolchain (Splunk, AppSignal, Errbit, Graphite/StatsD)
• Amazon Web Services (S3, EC2, RDS, VPC)

Projects include:

• Implementing backups
• Implementing and testing disaster recovery
• Bringing platform uptime to 99.99%
• Bringing infrastructure under configuration management (Ansible)

Technical Due Diligence team lead for LaunchHouse, a startup incubator in Cleveland Ohio.

Junior Software Developer for a Biomedical company. Along the way assisted with a full-stack (C#/Windows, Django/Linux) software development project which has been deployed at several major Cleveland Universities, and managed a proof-of-concept in Rails for a customer.