PORTLAND, OR, USA

+1 (971) 346-1133

craig@saxton.cloud

CRAIG SAXTON

Software Engineer with 20+ years of applied experience in a variety of verticals ( Finance, Property Management, Defense, Media, Insurance )

Passionate about delivering secure, observable, testable, resilient, performant and cost effective solutions.

Dedicated, hardworking individual with the communication skills required to work with all levels of an organization.

SKILLS

CERTIFICATIONS

EXPERIENCE

Cigna, Portland OR, USA — Application Development Sr. Advisor ( contract via Randstad Technologies USA )

August 2020 - September 2023

The Cigna Group is a fortune 50 multinational managed healthcare and insurance company.

[Python, NodeJS, AWS/OpenShift, Terraform, Jenkins, SQL, GraphQL/REST, Docker, Kafka, Avro]

• Expanded cross-organizational interaction data sharing by designing & developing an event driven interaction data pipeline. This pipeline serves as the enterprise’s central means for receiving, normalizing, vetting and disseminating partner/customer interaction information
• Upskilled team members by mentoring in group and paired-development venues for unit testing, git, python, AWS development & support practices ( a fantastic team that started with no experience in AWS, python, terraform or nodejs and absolutely rose to the occasion )
• Ensured project alignment with shifting organizational priorities by

• Collaborating with product owners to produce stories and tasks from features, for several development efforts.
• Frequently communicating and managing changes with team members preferring minimal disruptive means such as project ‘blogs/changelogs’ and e-mail.

• Ensured reliable and responsive system operation by:

• employing DevOps with a heavy focus on tooling and automation
• authoring a comprehensive collection of playbooks and runbooks

• Reduced defect rate and ensured codebase/system consistency/navigability by

• developing & implementing published coding, naming and design standards (where possible, enforcing standards employing automation/build-pipelines & fitness functions)
• conducting code reviews
• employing corporate code quality tools

• Enabled integration of key LOB applications by designing & developing a GraphQL API using AWS lambda and AWS OpenSearch
• Published several billion historical interaction records across the enterprise by designing, developing and executing a large scale phased data migration effort
• Streamlined team’s testing and release process by designing & developing the following tooling

• Developed a unix-style/pipeable CLI to generate randomized but realistic test data based off of a variety of JSON schema - eventually ended up being adopted by partner teams as part of their testing efforts
• Implemented BDD styled cloud hosted integration tests
• Developed cloud hosted performance testing infrastructure
• Developed a CLI to facilitate easier and more reliable release process including the generating requisite artifacts and calculating deployment and rollback plans

• Improved partner intake/onboarding by authoring several partner onboarding workflow & integration guides liaising with said partners to continuously refine and disambiguate the evolving processes.
• Enabled responsive and improved continuous integration for team’s portfolio of projects by maintaining and enhancing build pipelines

News UK (Times/Sunday Times), London UK — Senior Software Engineer

March 2019 - July 2020

News UK provides news, analysis and opinion to over 40 million subscribers in the UK and internationally.

[NodeJS/Typescript, AWS, TeamCity/CircleCI, Terraform/Serverless, SQL, GraphQL, TeamCity/CircleCI, Docker]

• Streamlined and simplified content publication by maintaining and enhancing the core GraphQL API responsible for providing content for the Times web, mobile, tablet and kindle channels.
• Facilitated the performance improvement of several system by implementing load testing support using commercial cloud based load testing products
• Mentored junior developers, with a focus on general skill sets that port across tech stack and frameworks ( design, refactoring, SDLC and testing practice )
• Designed & delivered the backend functionality, including custom deployment pipeline, for the Times’ new ‘Channels & Collections’ initiative, offering custom and curated topical content for customers to explore
• Reduced operational costs of several legacy systems by conducting platform migration, consolidation and upgrade efforts.

Viavi Solutions Inc., Newbury UK — Senior Software Engineer

June 2015 - March 2019

Viavi Solutions is a global provider of network test, monitoring and assurance solutions for communications service providers, enterprises, network equipment manufacturers, original equipment manufacturers, government and avionics.

[C#/NodeJS/Python, Mesos, AWS, AngularJS/ASP.NET, SQL/ElasticSearch/MongoDB, REST, Jenkins/Ansible/Octopus Deploy/DSC, Docker, RabbitMQ]

• Improved the GEOoptimize product’s UX by

• Collaborating more closely with, not only product managers, but also the field trial engineers to develop and rapidly prototype new user and operations features
• Pairing with a junior developer to successfully develop a re-imagined v2 web UI aligned more closely with the various persona workflows interacting with the product.

• Promoted the employment of light-weight development processes; open source cluster platforms (Mesos & Docker Swarm), modern source control, publication and packaging
• Prototyped ansible scripted AWS development and test environments for the GEOoptimize product

Qualcomm Inc., San Diego, CA USA — Senior Programmer/Analyst

February 2012 - October 2014

QUALCOMM Incorporated designs, develops, manufactures, and markets digital communications products and services.

[C#/NodeJS, AngularJS/ASP.NET, SQL, Jenkins/Bamboo]

• Extended and maintained a portfolio of custom internal workflow applications
• Reduced development workload and deployment issues by implementing and maintaining Continuous Integration & Deployment infrastructure for the team
• Delivered improved user experience by introducing and promoting the adoption of Single Page Application clients and RESTful Web APIs. Efforts included phased migration of legacy portfolio items
• Improved team project management by adopting commercial issue tracking & Scrum based project tracking software
• Fostered inter-team knowledge sharing by establishing a developer blog, posting numerous instructional / design approach articles and hosting inter-team development workshops
• Migrated disorganized code to a more stable and structured DDD approach
• Designed and implemented a set of highly composable UI components grid/table filtering components

Science Applications International Corporation. (SAIC), San Diego, CA USA — Senior Programmer/Analyst

December 2008 - February 2012

SAIC is a Fortune 500 scientific, engineering and technology applications company that uses its deep domain knowledge to solve problems of vital importance to the USA and the world, in national security, energy & environment, critical infrastructure and health

[C#/Javascript, ASP.NET, SQL, CruiseControl.net]

• Enhanced and maintained the key LOB application responsible for managing projects within the enterprise
• Improved work effort communication by Designing and developing an Event Management sub-system responsible for the scheduled delivery of targeted business information to line workers and management across the enterprise
• Designed and developed a ‘push reporting’ feature that allowed users to subscribe to various BI reports from within the LOB application UI and have these reports delivered (via e-mail) on schedules specified by the user

ScholarPoint Financial LLC, San Diego, CA USA — Lead Software Engineer

November 2005 - December 2008

ScholarPoint Financial was a small and dynamic originator of Federal Student Loans with a focus on 100% online process.

[C#, ASP.NET, SQL, WFF/BizTalk, CruiseControl.net, REST]

• Enhanced and maintained consumer facing web site, providing new features and functionality to ScholarPoint customers.
• Designed and developed a Lead Submission System for use by ScholarPoint marketing affiliates. The system allows the business to register new lead partners; store leads and ‘flow lead context’ into ScholarPoint‟s consumer facing web application, creating a seamless user experience from lead partner site to ScholarPoint site
• Integrated and maintained guarantor and payment processes with EdFund and US Bank
• Significantly improved product quality and delivery times by

• Adopting commercial development project management software (JIRA)
• Establishing code quality standards and unit testing practices
• Establishing pre-production environments

College Loan Corporation, San Diego, CA USA — Software Engineer / Analyst

March 2003 - June 2005

College Loan Corporation was the nation’s seventh largest student loan provider.

[C#/VB6, ASP.NET, SQL, OOA, UML]

• Designed and implemented a highly successful in-house telemarketing system, employing an n-tier design with a Winform ‘thin client’ using document style XML messaging with full Avaya telephony system integration.
• Designed and implemented a centralized service suite providing functionality for both Marketing and Sales systems. The system supported the submission and review of leads; creation and assignment of Sales Opportunities to name a few.
• Conducted enterprise analysis for identity resolution project. This involved rapid enterprise documentation using UML; producing regularly released analysis findings and executive summaries, vendor liaison and resolution process prototyping