Software Engineering Technical Director

JUSTUS BRAKE

Westlake, OH 440-***-**** ********@*****.*** linkedin.com/in/justus-brake

TECHNICAL DIRECTOR

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT BUSINESS SOLUTIONS Summary of Qualifications

●HIGH-PERFORMING TECHNICAL DIRECTOR with proven leadership abilities, strong business acumen, and 20 years of experience in driving large-scale, completely innovative technology projects from the ground up serving enterprise customers

●CREATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVER specializing in an entrepreneurial approach to business opportunities, with a focus on building digitally-connected products that scale with marketing and product goals, minimizing tech debt

●EXCELLENT COMMUNICATOR who clearly presents solutions and architectures to colleagues, business partners, and non-technical clients at all levels of an organization

Areas of Expertise

LEADERSHIP: Program & Project Management Strategic Planning Change Management Product Management Process Improvement Business Solutions Team Management Onboarding & Mentoring Problem Solving Collaboration INDUSTRY: IT Architecture Software Engineering Software Development Life Cycle Security Management Intellectual Property Licensing Data Engineering Marketing Automation Business Intelligence Technical SEO Report Automation Version Control Lean Methodology Kanban SCRUM Open API Professional Experience

FSI PITTSBURGH, PA (REMOTE)

ENGINEERING MANAGER September 2023 - Present

Key Projects:

●Streamlined team workflow by strategically prioritizing and focusing the team, resulting in an average reduction of 70% in cycle time from 60 days to 20 days, and a reduction in escalated ticket backlog by 250 from 625

Technologies used: Azure Dev Ops Sleuth.io Netsuite ZenDesk

●Improved business processes by identifying thin areas of cross-training and setting up key pain points with my repeatable Subject Matter Expert Matrix process, increasing SME coverage by 300%

Technologies used: .NET SQL Python SSIS Angular React Native DevExtreme

●Developed tools to take apart monster multi-tenant databases and migrate them, coordinating a grand rebalancing to make use of cost saving General Purpose resources, improving Business Continuity by allowing geographic failover groups, and offering additional professional services offerings SSO and business unit move

Technologies used: Azure DevOps SQL

●Addressed Critical Feature Shortcomings with by updating legacy asset location data. Fixing Spot Shadow allowing workers to see what is above and or below the floor their focus for facilities maintenance

Technologies used: Paper Pen Geometry Pinhole Camera Model PDF manipulation Leadership & Team Management:

●Led the cross functional Keep The Business Running Team, allowing feature teams to deliver like never before, operationally handling triage, all bugs, platform, infrastructure, reporting, technical debt reduction, implementation ever more efficiently

Technologies used: Azure DevOps SQL .NET Typescript SSIS PIM

●Improved communication and collaboration across departments as part of Culture Advocacy Team leadership

Technologies used: MS Teams Powerpoint Slido

●Directly managed a diverse global engineering team, building a team mentoring with authenticity (6 US, 5 Bolivia)

●Established trust with customers through technical explanations and support (pre-sales and ongoing customer service) HIREVUE SALT LAKE CITY, UT (REMOTE)

ENGINEERING MANAGER March 2022 – June 2023

Key Projects:

●Reduced open Support Escalations to engineering by 70% in 15 months. Aiding in investigations, improving reporting and prioritization. Making a nudger bot that interfaces with slack to bring attention to tickets approaching deadlines for our Service Level Expectations Refactoring into a python based micro environment maintainable and reusable by any developer in the company

Technologies used: JavaScript (Google Apps Script) Slack Shortcut Django Flower AWS EC2 -> Lambda

●Improved usability of a critical product area by developing a tagging system for our CodeVue coding challenge assessments allowing searchable and meaningful filters changing this from an unsorted list of 3,000 options to smart suggestions of less than ten appropriate options

Technologies used: Python Flask GoCD pipeline PostgreSQL

●Pivoted team to a business critical problem that was going to affect customer renewals, specifically of State Farm. Expediting remediation for a way to obtain the interview questions ahead of time through developer tools

Technologies used: Python Open API JavaScript (React) Insomnia

●Stayed focused on new technology seeing to completion important strategic projects with the Amazon Web Service based SFTP solutions for data transfer

Technologies used: Python Flask AWS Transfer Service AWS API Gateway

●Filled product gaps with Self Service SSO - designing and building just enough code to eliminate the pain points of Single Sign On certificate rotation and prevent support tickets for what could be resolved by the customer themselves

Technologies used: Python JavaScript (React) Gitlab Leadership & Team Management:

●Manage Agents of SHIELD - superheroes as a distributed team of 3 US based developers and 3 Ukrainian based developers charged with fixing any and all bugs found and taking an extreme ownership of every request that comes to Engineering. Investigation experts into bugs in production for quick remediation of critical issues

Technologies used: Python Django ORM Gitlab Celery MFT

●Led Solutions Engineers - A customer facing engineering team composed of specialists. Technical product experts adept at what’s possible without code changes. Specializing in our API, chat bot, and SSO.

Technologies used: Python Django Admin Git Taleo AWS S3

●Welcomed over 40 new hires as part of the HireVue Academy orientation explaining Engineering's role in the organization within months of starting

●Hosted an open mic night during hack week bringing engineers out of their shells singing and playing music together MAKE & MODEL MARKETING CLEVELAND, OH

TECHNICAL DIRECTOR July 2018 – March 2022

Key Projects:

●Transformed business capabilities by developing specialized software products, expanding the company’s brand beyond marketing and increasing the customer base by 300% - allowing our regional marketing company to offer products across North America and without conflict to competitors in existing markets - and by offering more products increasing existing billable accounts by up to 20% monthly subscription

●Took a hands-on approach as the lead Java developer to create Reach Automotive Analytics, a scalable SaaS program that tracks KPIs from multiple sources on one dashboard for automotive dealerships, reaching 60+ customers and doubling gross profit in two months

Technologies used: Java (Maven,Google Cloud, REST, SOAP, Selenium) PHP (Wordpress) Python (Scrapy)

●Built an SEO crawler to monitor 500 client websites, automatically notifying the team of any modified meta information improving keyword ranking and technical SEO

Technologies used: Javascript (Google Apps Script) Google Sheets (Cell Formula Import XML) Asana (Create Tasks)

●Constructed a keyword gap program to analyze the keyword rankings of the company and its competitors, improving SEO and search rankings with data-driven suggestions for future marketing content

Technologies used: Javascript (Google Apps Script, Supermetrics)

●Saved a principal of the company 60 hours per month through automation and improved business processes, including building reports automatically and alerting automatically on data pipeline interruption

Technologies used: Java (Maven, Selenium, SMTP) SEO (AHrefs)

●Automated web scraping, document management, Facebook ads, and lead tracking systems; connected clients to the data warehouse, increasing data collection capacity, and software product offerings

Technologies used: Java (Maven, FTP, Selenium) Javascript (Google Apps Script) Leadership & Team Management:

●Manage a 5-person development team, incorporating weekly sprints and implementing Scrum and Kanban (Scrumban) methodologies in weekly sprints

Technologies used: Asana Salesforce

●Onboarded 4 new hires per year by introducing key company processes and systems with 75% retention.

●Created a file naming standardization system for the organization, and implemented a file server letting files be quickly shared across the organization in a standardized way

Technologies used: Dell Server Hardware CentOS Virtual Box Samba ACUITY-VCT WESTLAKE, OH

SENIOR MANAGER, SUPPORT & IMPLEMENTATION January 2012 – December 2016

●Quadrupled recurring revenue by expanding support agreements from $75K to $300K per year

●Maintained and monitored 300+ enterprise-level servers with an average of 24 TB of data

Technologies used: Dell Server Hardware SuSE Linux VPNs (Dozens) SSH Bash

●Designed end-user facing application features and interfaces, including a configuration import wizard, and an alarm categorization system.

Technologies used: Java HTML SMTP

●Managed version release implementation and testing in-house and at beta sites for B2B partners such as Museum Fine Arts Boston and Allegheny Ludlum; diagnosed and triaged critical systems roadblocks to minimize disruption

Technologies used: CVS SSH IP Networking Axis Cameras IQeye Cameras SALES ENGINEER January 2009 – January 2012

●Created a profit center by engineering application features to meet end user requirements

●Initiated a company wiki, sharing institutional knowledge in an accessible way for 16 employees

●Designed health reporting systems to backup configuration and drive sales leads, showing additional storage and maintenance needs of existing customers

●Conducted audits of existing IT architecture and equipment, proposing solutions and implementing changes such as additional servers, camera location, and remote connection options

Technologies used: 3ware Axis Certified Professional IP Networking PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT ENGINEER November 2006 – January 2009

●Redesigned administration UI into a new application, allowing for intuitive system configuration for camera and user configuration

Technologies used: Java (Swing)

●Improved Camera Based Motion Alarming System with custom video analytics development, reducing false alarms in natural lighting environments by 90%

Technologies used: Java (Buffered Images) C

●Maintained legacy API and systems integration software, keeping critical connections intact

Technologies used: Java Bash C#

Teaching Work

INSTRUCTOR, Tech Corps Cleveland Ohio - John Marshall High School 2017 Trained 16 high school students on web development skills as part of Student Web Corps for college credit

Technologies used: HTML CSS Javascript Cpanel Wordpress Drupal Business Ownership Experience

OWNER & TEACHER, Tubthumpers Music Olmsted Township, OH 2002 – 2009 Expanded existing local business by 300%, with a focus on streamlining business practices and accounting processes Technical Skills

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES: JavaSE Javascript Python C Bash Ollama2 AI APIS/LIBRARIES: Google Analytics Google Ads Selenium Rest Soap Google Apps Script Django OTHER TECHNOLOGIES: Networking Linux Server Hardware RAID 3D Printing Gsuite VOIP CMS AWS Azure DevOps Education

MASTER OF ENGINEERING INNOVATION MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH 2020 Key Courses: Convexity and Optimization Intellectual Property Licensing & Commercialization Product Development BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN MATHEMATICS Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH 2006 BACHELOR OF ARTS IN MUSIC Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH 2006

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