Resume
Andrew Baker Microservices | Pragmatism | Leadership | Lifelong Learning |
Prescott, AZ website: orangeru.work linkedin: abaker2 github: bakerag1 |
PROFESSIONAL PROFILE
Experienced software engineer and technical leader committed to excellence and efficiency. I am a strong believer in asynchronous communication as a driver for the highest quality systems, teams, and documentation.
- created testing and review culture, reducing production incidents by 90%
- migrated dozens of legacy services to the cloud
- designed and built greenfield, cloud native, central reservation service
CORE COMPETENCIES
Go | Node.js | Java 4-11 | Amazon Web Services | GitLab CI | Jira | Distributed Systems | Scrum | SQL | Terraform | Kubernetes | Prometheus | Python | Kafka | Docker | AppDynamics | ELK | Splunk | Cassandra | Jenkins
WORK EXPERIENCE
Principal Engineer | First Citizens Bank (Silicon Valley Bank) - Tempe, AZ Nov 2021 - Sept 2024
Led a team from conception to production delivery of a new payment orchestration platform on
Amazon Web Services, leveraging Step Functions, Lambdas in Node.js, EventBridge, and DynamoDB,
integrating with various legacy and vendor systems.
Also:
- designed and implemented several REST services
- worked on various employee groups for improving the development environment and cloud adoption
- organized weekly team lead discussion group
- built out system documentation wiki
Sr. Engineer (II, I) | American Express - Phoenix, AZ Feb 2017 - Oct 2021
As Site Reliability Engineering team lead:
- implemented Jaeger tracing system and drove tracing standards for the platform, reducing triage efforts from hours to minutes
- enhanced existing and created new support and deployment tools and pipelines
As B2B Payments team lead:
- dramatically reduced integration testing time and production incidents by creating culture of unit testing, code review, and pipelines
- introduced site reliability engineering practice to a team of 40+ engineers, testers, and production support personnel
- migrated 7 services from WebSphere to kubernetes on-prem
Sr. Software Engineer | Choice Hotels Intl. - Phoenix, AZ June 2000 - Feb 2017
Lead Java engineer on choiceEDGE reservation system, a greenfield replacement for the decades-old central reservations service. The system was built on a microservices architecture on AWS, using Cassandra, Amazon Simple WorkFlow (now known as Step Functions), and ActiveMQ, handling thousands of requests per second.
Also:
- co-led group of team leads to drive standards and consistency across the application
- technical product owner for multiple teams.
- presented technical topics to engineering organization
- presented at Cassandra Summit on choiceEDGE
Prior roles include:
- migrating services to Oracle Service Bus
- desktop client/server application development and support
- server processes, using Java and C++
EDUCATION & CERTIFICATIONS
Graduate study in Philosophy | Boston College - Boston, MA | May 2000
B.A. Philosophy | Northern Arizona University - Flagstaff, AZ | May 1997
AWS Cloud Practitioner | Sun Certified Java 5 Programmer
PERSONAL
Outside of my professional life, I am an avid homebrewer and trail runner, constantly experimenting with new recipes and pushing my limits in endurance challenges. I believe that the same principles of experimentation and resilience apply to both my personal and professional endeavors.