Dan Schaefer

Led the effort to establish and define programming languages, tools, frameworks, AWS technologies, SDLC processes, CI/CD processes, etc. for the entire program. Designed, built, and implemented re-useable GitLab CI/CD pipelines, Terraform modules, and other supporting development tools while following industry and security best practices. Successfully led an integrations team to build event-based ETL processes in AWS, to transform data from our DynamoDB table into various file formats to send to partners. Led weekly collaborative sessions across all application development teams within the program, ensuring cross-team communication was maintained. Created and maintained onboarding documentation for the technology personnel and ensured that best practices were being followed. Heavily involved in the interviewing for developers, QA Lead(s), IT Managers, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, etc.

Architected and implemented features, systems, and microservices that optimize the effectiveness of the SEO Autopilot product using Python 2 for legacy systems and Python 3 for greenfield microservices. Designed and implemented centralized Python 3 microservices running in Kubernetes and cloud functions to retrieve, process, and cache Google SERPs. Implemented and sent emails to users with A/B testing in mind, showing the performance that SEO Autopilot brings to the customer's sites while helping to increase user engagement with the platform. Acted as a stand-in DevOps resource, Scrum Master, and coach for the Autopilot team and other product teams. Mentored and managed Junior Developers and conducted code reviews for the team.

Led a team of high-performing Software Engineers to rearchitect a major component of our legacy application written in Python 2 into a more sustainable data model by slicing the application into gRPC/Python 3 microservices. I drove the team to succeed by encouraging test-driven development, pair programming, and collaboration. Acted as the team DevOps resource by establishing acceptable metrics for our applications, setting up alerts, and reporting the status on internal dashboards. Collaborated with DBAs, Systems Engineers, and other Software Engineers to formulate the best solution(s) for any problem my team had been given to solve. Participated in several lunch-and-learn sessions, where I educated other engineers on the things I have learned in my day-to-day.

Built out repeatable Kubernetes infrastructure using Ansible, Cloud Formation, and other AWS technologies. Collaborated with other Systems Engineers and Software Engineers from multiple teams to build out a CI/CD solution and build/test/deploy pipelines for the various applications. Created a framework for new applications to standardize builds and deployments. Built dashboards in Grafana to report the status of infrastructure and applications. Actively participated in a 24x7 on-call rotation.

Migrated the marketing site from a third-party hosting platform to a self-hosted solution, automating the configuration of the servers using Ansible. Developed and maintained integration code for importing employee and punch clock data with many of our customers' time and attendance systems. Expanded the infrastructure from a single web server to multiple, load-balanced web servers and celery workers for backend, asynchronous processors. Automated provisioning and configuration of entire, hand-built application infrastructure using Ansible. Maintained Nagios configuration using Ansible and responsible for responding to Nagios alerts in a proactive manner.

Infrastructure design and implementation for Virtual Reality software. Assisted in implementing Continuous Integration using Github hooks, Jenkins, and Ansible. Relied heavily on Amazon Web Services for most of the company's infrastructure. Implemented a backup solution using Bacula. Continuous Integration using Subversion hooks, Selenium, and Ansible.

Actively developed and maintained a web application that administers pre-paid maintenance plans and customer retention tools for the automotive industry. Maintained the entire systems and network infrastructure that supports the application, including the company's internal servers and network.

Developed and maintained a repair ticketing system for the railroad industry built on a LAMP stack. Developed and maintained an inventory/retail management system for a convenience store distributor, integrating data from a mainframe system into a MySQL database for reporting and bi-directional syncing of said data. Developed and maintained several static websites for various companies, including the company's own website.