Software Development Lead (Backend) at Brillio — Client: Franklin Templeton (2025-01 – Present)
Account Opening Platform 2.0 (Ultra-High-Net-Worth Client Onboarding). Promoted to backend lead on the recommendation of senior architects and management; led a team of up to 5 engineers rebuilding a heavily criticized legacy client-facing platform from POC to MVP to production, serving 500–1,000 daily active users.
- Led the platform's Java 17→21 migration ahead of the MVP release, completing the upgrade with minimal disruption to the delivery timeline.
- Sole backend engineer on-call during live-market (production) hours — monitored and maintained services in real time while concurrently developing features for upcoming releases.
- Architected the platform's two core microservices along clear domain boundaries: a Drools-based rules engine governing all UI field behavior, and a secure persistence service acting as the sole authorized gateway to internal Franklin Templeton systems.
- Adopted AI-assisted development (GitHub Copilot in IntelliJ, premium tier across all models) as it rolled out at the firm from Jan 2026, integrating prompt-driven workflows into daily engineering to significantly increase throughput while retaining ownership of architecture, review, and correctness; ranked in the firm's top 5% on AI cost-efficiency (prompt spend vs. code accepted) throughout.
- Extended beyond company-provided tooling by independently adopting Claude Code, running parallel instances via git worktrees to advance multiple workstreams concurrently, and using AI assistance to confidently extend delivery beyond backend into front-end and DevOps tasks.
- Automated over 60% of previously manual onboarding and KYC logic and improved responsiveness by 60–80% over the legacy platform.
- Built a generic recursive Cosmos DB save utility on the Patch API supporting arbitrary object structures at 5–10 ms response times, working around a known SDK upsert limitation.
- Designed a workflow system pairing database-controlled state with a dynamic rules layer; validated as a POC and shipped to production.
- Mentored and managed a summer intern new to enterprise Java, guiding him to ship several production APIs for database persistence and workflow logic.
Backend Engineer at Brillio — Client: Franklin Templeton (2024-01 – 2025-12)
SWP Forms (Systematic Withdrawal Plan). Hand-picked by the lead architect to build a standalone Drools rules-engine microservice; cut processing time for 500+ business rules from several seconds to 50–100 ms using fact injection, agenda groups, and salience-based prioritization.
- Delivered the base architecture and MVP in 3 months before handoff; later extended to power a second production application.
Backend Developer at Brillio — Client: Franklin Templeton (2021-05 – 2024-12)
CashApp (Financial Transaction System). Mentored by a 20-year architect on a 3-person team; became a primary contributor on core transaction-processing design across an 18-month POC-to-MVP build and 2 years of enhancements. Contracted to Franklin Templeton; performance led to a two-year contract extension, conversion to full-time Brillio employee, and promotion to Software Development Lead. Worked full Eastern-time hours from the West Coast (6 AM PT start) for 5+ years.
- Selected to assist the CashApp team's Java 8→21 upgrade, applying migration experience from Account Opening Platform 2.0 to help modernize a long-lived production codebase across multiple major language versions.
- Became the team's primary production maintainer after two years on the system, personally overseeing live market-hours processing of time- and data-sensitive transactions collectively worth tens of millions of dollars daily; the pipeline's strict timing windows meant any missed cutoff or incomplete data forced a restart or rolled settlement to the next business day — an outcome never allowed to occur on my watch, often requiring real-time coordination with teams across the firm.
- Drove major post-MVP enhancements: bulk transaction processing, deprecation of legacy processing in favor of FIS Global Plus posting — a multi-currency portfolio accounting and trust custody platform used to enter and settle trades, cash receipts, and disbursements — and integration of Azure-based check-reading AI.
- Owned the end-to-end financial processing lifecycle for $10M+ in daily transactions ($106B+ lifetime): bank confirmations, OFAC compliance scans, and government audit-trail processing.
- Designed an event-driven architecture on Azure Event Grid with message queues powering 20+ heavy scheduled jobs — several on 5-minute cycles, including OFAC scanning and posting transactions to banks.
- Eliminated production deadlock failures — from 2–5 incidents per day to zero — by refactoring the application workflow with an optimistic concurrency control layer, retryable services, and custom thread pool executors.
- Implemented SAGA choreography over RabbitMQ for cross-service transactions, later migrating messaging to Azure Service Bus.
- Led technical design discussions across cross-functional groups of 20–30 with product owners and business analysts.
