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.