Alvin Ohlenbusch
Software Architect/Dev in Boston, MA
About
Focus on the Big-Picture & Breaking Complex Problems into Actionable Steps
Proven success architecting and building scalable, secure, reliable customer facing products in both startups and large companies. Leading teams responsible for development, database, infrastructure, QA, and integration with partners. Strong track record of developing and delivering quality microservice systems in many different languages and operating systems.
Work Experience
Architected and led the development of the backend system to support a benefits platform for non-traditional workers. Built using Python, GoLang, MongoDB, GraphQL and gRPC and hosted on AWS and supporting a Web and mobile app built using React. Our system allows a user to signup on the web, iOS or Android App, connect the bank account where they get paid and set up benefits similar to what a traditional employer might provide. Their account would be watched for income being deposited into that account and would automatically set aside some of that money for tax, time off, a rainy day fund, and retirement. We also provided an interface to search for, apply and obtain health insurance from the national marketplace while maximizing any possible tax credits.
- Built a consumer facing architecture that integrates banking, taxes, investments, and insurance
- Experience working with external service providers/APIs
-- Aggregators (Plaid, Quovo)
-- BaaS (Unit, Bond, BBVA Open Platform, Synapse)
-- RIA investment products (Folio/Goldman Sachs - IRAs, SEP)
-- Health Insurance (DE/EDE via CMS) - Secure system and databases housing personal and sensitive information
- Agile fast paced development approach; released at least twice a week in a production env used by hundreds of thousands
- Led development of a self-repairing architecture that resolved synchronous calls, webhooks, and batch operations
- GraphQL server built in Python and using MongoDB
- Federated graphQL system fronting the Python- and Go-based GraphQL schemas
- Using gRPC and microservices to facilitate communication from Python to Go GraphQL layers
- AWS infrastructure (EC2, ECS, Fargate, S3) managed via Terragrunt/Terraform
- Scalable, Secure, and Highly Available
- Postgres/MySQL
- Did all of the above in mission-critical settings involving money movement and insurance enrollment
- CI/CD using Bitrise
Managed globally distributed team of enterprise architects. Oversight of product development projects to ensure consistency with company development standards, tools in regards to hardware, software, database, security, open source and storage.
- Reduced time to delivery and improved reliability by ensuring project delivery of complex systems that were scalable, highly available, cost effective, timely, and supportable.
- Coordinated communication between development groups and technical operations groups, providing proper hardware, networking, security, and storage to meet business needs.
Served as primary architect for new Fundamental’s data collection system (TRF), including UI, database, web servers, application servers, and distributed network environment. Awarded patent for technology designed and developed for System of Click Thru.
- Provided a master database of record, automation, collection UI, and real-time feeds to legacy systems and other internal users, building entire system for high availability and disaster recovery.
- Led architecture of all functional components, including web services, windows application, database, services, and coordinated global development groups, launching project successfully.
Architected, designed, and developed a plug-in for a windows-based application used for collecting fundamentals data and allowing the user to interactively identify important financial data to be saved in the database. The data was saved along with location information so that the data could be traced back to the location in the original document.
- Provided a competitive advantage by enabling functionality unique to our products, allowing customers the ability to trace back to original sources where the displayed financial values came from.
- Coordinated with teams regarding database design and implementation, integration of the plug-in, deployment, and testing, facilitating fully functional releases from data collection, to storage, to ultimately displaying on customer facing products.
- Developed software in C#/.NET using pdftron libraries for interacting with PDF documents, allowing data collection analysts to interact with PDFs rather than re-entering data.
- Migrated Click Thru collection functionality to Reuter’s fundamentals collection system in addition to the Thomson Financial system, allowing new features to be reused across all fundamental collection, and driving further competitive advantage.
Held responsibility for architecture of new highly available Research Backend repository across multiple businesses within Thomson Financial, and for enhancements and maintenance of several legacy applications. Generated over $50M in revenue.
- Collaborated to consolidate product offerings between traditional products and products of Merger Company, lowering operational costs, and allowing for ability to remove redundant systems.
- Developed software using Windows .NET, C#, Oracle DB, HP Unix, IBM MQSeries, allowing for high availability and fault tolerance while ensuring no data was lost.
Education
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