J. Gavin Ray

(408) 634-4547
Kitsap Peninsula, Wa

J. Gavin Ray

Software Engineer

Skillset

Python
Golang
Kubernetes
Amazon Web Services
OpenStack

Social Profiles

Professional Profile

Engineer who enjoys working in an operational environment with infrastructure and integration solutions. Experienced in delivering production software on a continual basis while maintaining service level agreements. Passionate about working to reduce technical debt on projects to help increase developer velocity.

Specifically I enjoy providing solutions to complex problems that are designed to run at scale with rock solid dependability. Two examples of this are bare metal provisioning, and building managed SaaS platforms. I am passionate about learning and leveraging new technologies; And applying them to existing projects to help provide the best developer experience possible.

Over the course of my career, I have had the privilege to work with many great individuals with whom we have been able to build great products and learn from each other. As a result two methodologies and a habit that have become a part of my daily development cycle: Test Driven (Mostly During...) Development, Continuous Deployment, and documentation. After being introduced to these methods and wielding them successfully on several projects, to be frank there is no better/faster way to deliver value to customers. And documentation, I have had the privilege (believe it or not this isn't sarcasm!) of being the new person who had to disassemble software and tribal knowledge without context. Because of this experience, I work hard to ensure that all my work is easily digestible for my colleagues.

Resume

My experience and education.

Experience

Senior Staff Engineer

  • Lead effort to migrate core revenue generating applications from static to dynamic infrastructure.

  • Designed and implemented a common infrastructure platform based on open source software.

  • Refactored the production deployment process to allow for engineering groups to ship and manage their software.

  • Extended infrastructure platform to automate the management of mission critical revenue generating applications.

  • Authored automation and framework that ensures HiTrust compliance on all changes to covered environments.

  • Core contributor of the incident management process, covering infrastructure, software, and security incidents.

  • Lead effort to add observability across entire software stack.

Machinify Inc.

2021 - present

Senior Software Engineer

  • Worked within the Site Engineering Team at Packet which was acquired by Equinix Metal.

  • Standardized deployment model across multiple teams to drastically improve release velocity.

  • Successfully coordinated the migration of entire production stack in twenty one sites from four orchestration systems to a single unified platform.

  • Collaborated to create the standards and working agreement for the site engineering organization.

  • Lead effort to operationalize and open source internal VPN service Doorman.

  • Served in various capacities in the incident response unit.

Equinix

2020 - 2021

Software Engineer

  • Owned the roadmap for internal automation and tooling.

  • Lead engineer on HPE OneSphere and Platform9 integration project/product.

  • Core contributor of life cycle management tooling used in all Platform9 deployments. This included initial deployments, upgrades (in multiple clouds and on premise), certificate management and more.

  • Implemented security monitoring, remediation and reporting tooling.

  • Configuration and change management for production environments.

  • Refactored large applications into containerized micro-services to improve availability and testability.

  • Built and maintained physical environment at colocation, managed production cloud accounts.

  • Successfully maintained 99.9% SLA for production environments internal services and tooling.

  • Mentored interns through the process of successfully creating and shipping SaaS products.

Platform9 Systems

2016 - 2020

Software Developer

  • Core developer on team that created version 2.0 of PortalDirect REST API. This new release added major functionality updates that allows integration with an additional government agency. Optimized codebase, and migrated to new PaaS to increase performance by a factor of two

  • Led development team in updating software tool chain and methodologies to include test driven development, version control (git), issue tracking, and continuous integration.

  • Ported appraiser analytics application from desktop to web application.

  • Implemented API that allow existing desktop form filling software to integrate analytics into reports.

  • Created web portals integrating web application with other online offerings: Public Records data, Regression analysis of Real Estate sales, 1004MC Calculations, UAD Compliance checking.

  • Co-authored a framework that distributes data-intensive processing across multiple nodes. Framework has been adopted by all new online backend projects.

  • Developed libraries and API for location based analysis.

  • Worked on software that converted Delphi 7 UI elements into HTML5 UI elements.

  • Updated proprietary tools to incorporate open source alternatives which increased production and saved over $24,000 a year.

Software Engineer

  • Maintained industrial automation applications deployed at over a hundred customer sites. I have personally written or customized the software at 13 of these locations.

  • Wrote libraries that created a standard user interface to be cross platform on weight based controllers/indicators.

  • Ported several software programs from an internal domain specific language to ANSI C.

  • Helped establish the official company standards for documentation and testing of software applications.

  • Directly responsible for managing relationships with customers by providing on going support for deployed automation applications.

ABM Scale Company

2012 - 2014

Education

CSIS - Computer Programming

Upon completion of the program, my course work and interaction with my fellow students earned multiple letters of recommendation and commendation from my professors.

Gavilan College

2011 - 2014

CSIS - Unix Operating System

I have successfully completed the available program and maintained a 4.0 GPA while working full time.

Gavilan College

2011 - 2014

Contact

I'm always looking for challenging opportunities. If you have some exciting challenge you'd like to talk about, feel free to reach out to me!