Resume

Andrew Baker

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.

Prescott, AZ

Website: orangeru.work

Github: bakerag1 

LinkedIn: abaker2

WORK EXPERIENCE

First Citizens Bank (Silicon Valley Bank) - Tempe, AZ

Principal Engineer

November 2021 - September 2024

Lead 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, to perform payment validation, screening, and fulfillment.
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

American Express - Phoenix, AZ

Sr. Engineer (II, I)

February 2017 - October 2021

Most recent role was team lead for Site Reliability Engineering, supporting a microservice/event based loyalty platform written in Go. I simplified the monitoring platform to improve reliability of metrics, using Prometheus and Jaeger. I also assisted in the development of support tools, and GitLab pipeline enhancements, to improve efficiency and quality.

Prior accomplishments:

  • introduced site reliability engineering practice to a team of 40+ engineers, testers, and production support personnel
  • migrated dozens of SVN repositories and multiple teams from SVN and Git
  • migrated multiple services from WebSphere to kubernetes on-prem; introduced legacy team to code review and pipeline; major wiki documentation cleanup and build out.
  • held educational sessions for team

Choice Hotels Intl. - Phoenix, AZ

Sr. Software Engineer (and many others)

June 2000 - February 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

Boston College - Boston, MA

September 1998 - May 2000

Graduate study in Philosophy

Northern Arizona University - Flagstaff, AZ

September 1993 - May 1997

B.A. Philosophy

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.

SKILLS

Go

Node.js

Java 4-11

Amazon Web Services

GitLab CI

Jira

Distributed Systems

Scrum

WORKING KNOWLEDGE

Terraform

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Python

Kafka

Docker

AppDynamics

ELK

Splunk

Cassandra

Jenkins

CERTIFICATIONS

AWS Cloud Practitioner

Sun Certified Java 5 Programmer