Serverless APIs
High-throughput REST APIs on API Gateway and Lambda, tuned with provisioned concurrency and documented with OpenAPI.
About
Engineer, architect, coach
I’m a software engineer with more than a decade of experience who enjoys the whole lifecycle of a product: shaping the requirements, designing the architecture, writing the code and keeping it healthy in production. I started my career in test automation, so quality is built in from the first line, not bolted on at the end.
Over nearly eight years at Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) I’ve grown from senior QA engineer to lead software engineer — most recently leading a serverless AWS API that securely processes more than 20,000 transactions a day, with infrastructure defined in Terraform and shipped through CI/CD.
Cloud & DevOps
Languages & Frameworks
Test Automation
Frontend
Practices
Focus
Cloud-native on AWS
AWS is where I do my best work. I design for operability from day one — least-privilege IAM, infrastructure as code, automated deployments and real observability — so systems stay cheap to run and easy to change.
Event-Driven Workflows
Asynchronous queues, dynamically scheduled Step Functions workflows and S3-triggered processing.
Data Modeling
DynamoDB single-table designs shaped around access patterns for predictable performance at scale.
Security & Delivery
Machine-to-machine auth with JWT authorizers, self-service secret rotation, Terraform and GitLab CI/CD.
How I work
Spec-Driven Development
- 01
Spec
Requirements & acceptance criteria
- 02
Architecture
Design, data flow & contracts
- 03
Build
AI-assisted code & tests
- 04
Deploy
AWS · Cloudflare
I practice Spec-Driven Development: before writing code, I capture requirements, design decisions and acceptance criteria in a clear, versioned specification. That spec becomes the shared contract between product, engineering and AI coding assistants, so what gets built matches what was intended — and changes are deliberate rather than accidental.
I’ve led training sessions for other teams across my organization on adopting the workflow: writing effective requirements, turning them into designs and task plans, and using the spec to guide AI-assisted implementation and review.
Requirements first
User stories and acceptance criteria that are testable and unambiguous.
Design before code
Architecture and data flow agreed up front, documented alongside the code.
AI-assisted delivery
Specs that steer AI coding tools toward correct, reviewable output.
Org-wide training
Workshops that helped other teams adopt the practice and ship with it.
Career
Experience
Jul 2021 — Present
Software Engineer III
Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC)
- Lead engineer for a highly scalable, serverless REST API on AWS that securely processes 20,000+ transactions a day.
- Designed the API contract — JSON schemas, REST endpoints and OpenAPI specifications — and a DynamoDB single-table data model; tuned latency with Lambda provisioned concurrency.
- Secured machine-to-machine access with Auth0 and a custom Lambda JWT authorizer on API Gateway HTTP APIs.
- Built event-driven pipelines: asynchronous processing with SQS and Lambda, dynamically scheduled Step Functions report workflows driven by EventBridge and DynamoDB, and S3-triggered SFTP delivery of generated reports.
- Created a self-service client secret rotation process that was adopted across the enterprise.
- Provisioned all infrastructure with Terraform and shipped through GitLab CI/CD pipelines; guided partners through API onboarding.
- Designed a daily Spring Batch job that validates and loads Mastercard Payment Gateway transactions into downstream systems, with scheduled summary and error reports by email.
- Built a React demo app showcasing payment gateway features: Hosted Checkout, Hosted Session, email payment links and Apple Pay.
Jan 2019 — Jul 2021 · Tampa, FL
Senior Software Quality Assurance Engineer
Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC)
- Implemented the test automation strategy for serverless, event-driven microservices on AWS.
- Developed an API testing framework with Cucumber, Node.js and JavaScript.
- Migrated 200+ Artillery functional API tests to Jest.
- Built TestRail integrations for Cucumber/WebdriverIO, Pytest and Jest so results reported automatically.
Feb 2016 — Dec 2018 · Tampa/St. Petersburg, FL
Software Quality Assurance Test Engineer
Bisk Education
- Fully automated testing of the company’s first online payments application, which reached a $2 million milestone in under a year.
- Designed a maintainable, parallelized automation framework that ran across browsers and devices on virtual machines or BrowserStack.
- Built a Web API to verify Salesforce data sync from lead form submissions without the UI, saving 2 minutes per test.
- Created a test case dashboard with TestRail integration that gave the QA manager shareable statistics for senior leadership.
- Wrote SQL queries to pull existing data into automated tests, giving realistic scenarios and faster test setup.
Apr 2012 — Feb 2016 · Pinellas Park, FL
Software Development Engineer in Test
West Point Underwriters
- Automated rate adjustments and document reprints for up to 40,000 production insurance policies — work that would have taken multiple data entry associates days to do by hand.
- Invented a rating utility web app that scraped coverage selections from the policy administration system and verified premiums in Excel, saving QA hours of manual effort.
- Wrote BDD automation in a shared domain-specific language to improve collaboration among QA, business analysts and stakeholders, with data-driven scenarios in Excel to cut duplication and simplify maintenance.
- Built a test results dashboard showing pass/fail history, Cucumber reports with screenshots, and the status of each product in every test environment.
Selected work
Projects
Clever Bees Tutoring
Visit siteA fast, accessible marketing site for a Tampa Bay literacy tutoring business offering one-on-one, evidence-based reading instruction.
- Pages prerendered to static HTML at build time for SEO and instant first paint, then hydrated into a React SPA
- Contact form handled by a Cloudflare serverless function with Turnstile bot protection and transactional email
- Responsive, mobile-first layout with accessibility built in
Contact
Let’s build something
Whether it’s a cloud architecture question, a role on your team or help bringing Spec-Driven Development to your organization, I’d love to hear from you.