Ronnie Taylor

Senior Staff Engineer | Backend Systems & Platform Development

About

Results-oriented Software Engineer with a strong foundation in software engineering, product development, leadership, systems infrastructure, and a passion for building robust and scalable applications. Experienced in team mentorship, systems architecture, and collaboration with DevOps teams.

Experience

Veracross

Senior Staff Engineer March 2024 – June 2025

As the tech lead for the Platform Team, coordinated with engineers across Australia, South America, the United States, and Europe to deliver high-quality, scalable infrastructure. Mentored teammates and integrated AI tools such as GitHub Copilot and local large language models to accelerate development velocity and improve code reliability. Partnered with third-party penetration-testing vendors to audit, document, and remediate application vulnerabilities. Guided the migration of CI/CD pipeline from CircleCI to GitHub Actions, cutting build times by 45%. Organized company-wide Lightning Talk sessions to promote a learning culture.

Staff Product Engineer March 2020 – March 2024

Led key platform initiatives including extending the OAuth2 system to support various external authentication providers. Engineered a granular access-management system that cut employee onboarding and offboarding time by half. Added internationalization to core applications enabling the company to serve global internal customers without separate codebases. Collaborated with DevOps to modernize AWS infrastructure, improving scalability and reliability. Standardized Docker images for MSSQL databases, allowing developers to spin up local environments instantly.

Web Services Manager March 2018 – January 2020

Led a high-performing team delivering mission-critical APIs, payment processing, and internal services. Instituted test-driven development, increasing automated test coverage from near 0% to roughly 85%. Spearheaded the organization's first CI/CD pipeline on CircleCI, cutting deployment times by 70%. Mentored junior engineers and maintained 99.99% uptime.

Senior Software Engineer April 2016 – March 2018

Partnered with senior colleagues to upgrade and extend a tuition and incidentals payment platform that processes over a billion dollars annually. Enhancements increased system availability to 99.998% and tightened security controls. Implemented robust monitoring and support processes that reduced downtime incidents by 40%.

AppZero

Lead Software Developer May 2012 – March 2016

Led development of a web service that enabled AppZero's proprietary app-virtualization tool to move Windows applications across data centers, using Ruby, Sinatra, Rails, PostgreSQL, and AWS. Partnered with executive leadership, sales, and product engineering to deliver a robust solution that accelerated customer migrations, reduced downtime, and increased customer satisfaction. Shaped the overall architecture of the Zapp platform to meet stringent scalability, reliability, and security standards.

Ronnie Taylor Consulting

Web Developer January 2007 – May 2012

Ran a web-development consultancy serving clients across the United States and Canada, building and deploying custom sites with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. A responsive e-commerce platform delivered for a retailer grew online sales by 20% in the first quarter. Implemented SEO best practices and CMS solutions (Drupal, WordPress, CodeIgniter).

Skills

Backend Development

  • Ruby on Rails
  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • React
  • SQL / PostgreSQL
  • Microsoft SQL Server

Cloud & Infrastructure

  • AWS (EC2, ECS, S3, RDS, ElastiCache, Athena, CloudWatch)
  • Azure
  • Docker
  • CI/CD (CircleCI, GitHub Actions)

Security & Architecture

  • OAuth2
  • Vault & Consul
  • Payment Systems & Gateways
  • Systems Architecture

Leadership

  • Team Mentorship
  • Engineering Management
  • Technical Writing
  • Agile / Scrum

Contact