Jacob Williams — Software Engineer

Seattle, WA · jacob@brokensandals.net · github.com/brokensandals

I have 12 years of professional experience focused mainly on backend development (including system design as well as implementation and testing) in Java and Ruby. I'm also proficient with Python from side projects and ML coursework, and I've worked with many other languages and a wide variety of frameworks and tools.

Experience

2021-2023 Logikcull Senior Backend Engineer
Ruby, Sinatra, Elasticsearch, Mongo, AWS, Docker

Maintained processing pipelines and search indexes for Logikcull, a web application that helps legal professionals find relevant documents within data dumps.

Rewrote system for doing bulk updates and certain expensive queries, to eliminate an expensive-to-maintain custom Elasticsearch plugin; included performance testing and monitoring to make sure the new approach did not degrade user experience.

Resigned in 2023 to focus on academic pursuits.

2020-2021 Ply Interactive Senior Software Engineer (part-time contractor)
Ruby, Rails, Mongo, RabbitMQ, Shopify API, Heroku, PostgreSQL

Maintained/enhanced Bloom, an ecommerce solution for wineries.

Designed/implemented custom task scheduler for background jobs, to give us greater flexibility in dividing processing resources among clients.

2010-2019 Cerner Associate Lead Software Engineer
Java, JAX-RS, Scala, Hadoop, HBase, MySQL, Docker, Ruby, Rails, Javascript, React

Built/maintained a variety of APIs, processing pipelines, libraries, and web apps, related to products that manage patient/personnel data for healthcare providers.

Found ways to improve developer productivity by building tools that became popular internally, such as a Postman-like tool for Apache Thrift services and workflow automation that sped up internal code releases “from ~45 minutes to ~6 minutes” according to one user.

Helped build a scalable search platform for pulling data from HBase into Solr.

Resigned in 2019 to enjoy some time off.

Education