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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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