Optum
Sr Director, Software Engineering - Conversational AI Core Services
2020-Present
(Promoted from Director to Sr. Director)
Leading the global Conversational AI Core Services
teams for UnitedHealth Group, consisting of more than 50 global members
across US, Ireland, and India.
- Leading the global Conversational AI Platform team,
to enable the development of digital and voice bots for the enterprise.
- Leading Voice Analytics Platform team to transcribe voice calls in real-time
to generate insights and summaries of phone calls between members &
advocates to reduce note taking burden and decrease average handle time.
- Simplifying conversational AI for the enterprise by creating a set of
reusable processes & capabilities while reducing time-to-value, ensuring
lines of business can move quickly without having to be experts.
- Vetting conversational AI technologies to operationalize for the enterprise
based on capabilities & interoperability with existing platforms. MS Azure
Bot Framework, MS Copilot Studio, Google Dialogflow, Open AI
- Established a global team across US, Ireland, and India into 3 pillars (6
scrum teams) to build a platform, enable a federated-development model, and
simplify complicated data science tasks. Each pillar has its own roadmap &
backlog.
- Automated self-provisioning through a company portal, inclusive of: code
repo, SDK & low-code tooling, build/deploy pipelines, versioning, automated
testing, cognitive services (NLP/AI/ML), and analytics.
- Driving productivity & reuse through microbot (skill) architecture behind a
layer of orchestration, allowing business units to compose unique
experiences from reusable components.
- Partnering with internal lines of business & technology partners to increase
consumer NPS scores while obviating the need to engage call center advocates
through bot fulfillment & automation.
- Equipping call center advocates to better serve members' inquiries more
quickly through the use of digital & voice assistants.
Optum
Sr Manager - Communications Platform
2018-2020
Modernizing enterprise healthcare document storage and messaging platforms
- Architected a cloud-native (AWS) healthcare-compliant document &
metadata storage platform to enable consumer-facing applications and support
enterprise paperless initiatives
- Managed a white-label secure messaging platform handling secure
communications between advocates & healthcare consumers across lines of
business
- Managed a SMS platform, leveraging Twilio, to centralize messages to/from
consumers across numerous enterprise programs
TCF Bank
Solutions Architect - Digital
2017-2018
Defined architecture for a new account opening platform for digital banking.
- Devised a new architecture to expediate the time required to open new
accounts from 15 to just under a few minutes, with all the safety & fraud
checks.
- Evaluated vendors for scanning and authenticating government-issued
documentation and assessing risk & fraud potential of new customers.
- Established a Java / Spring-based engineering function within Digital
Banking team with full-stack ownership
- Collaborating with Infrastructure team to pilot Kubernetes container
deployments
- Establishing DevOps culture in our product team
- Instrumented New Relic APM and Splunk logging & alerting for monitoring
purposes.
- Improving cross-functional relationships through transparancy and
collaboration
- Collaboration with product team to define roadmap and backlog
Lifetouch
Application Architect
2015-2017
Established architecture and led development for 6 brand new applications to
facilitate internal product designs, configuration, and customer-facing data
management & approvals
- Led multiple agile development teams simultaneously, consisting of ~15
(lead/jr) engineers, business analysts & automated/manual testers
- Developed project skeletons for fullstack applications, having code quality
and performance engineering best practices baked in, serving as the starting
point for new applications
- Introduced emerging technologies (NodeJS, Angular2, New Relic, Protractor,
SauceLabs, Confluence, Bamboo, Bitbucket) as predominant fixtures into the
enterprise
- Crafted and executed vision of gradually replacing our school-facing
Lifetouch Portal monolith application, and breaking it up into multiple
integrated applications for better performance, and maintainability
- Architected & led development of Template Designer, Product
Configurator, and Product Approval applications which allow us to design,
configure, obtain customer approvals on our products
- Architected & led development of Image Locker, an internal and
customer-facing image repository for securely uploading and classifying
images used in products
- Architected & led development of the Subject Data Management
application, allowing schools to manage their student & staff
information/images
- Collaborated with peers to procure & configure Atlassian/AWS products,
then established company's first automated cloud-based DevOps processes
- Instituted a regular operating rhythm of design sessions with CX/UX
interaction designers
- Established JavaScript unit testing strategy for our company
- Created automated testing framework with
NodeJS/Protractor/Cucumber/WebDriver, which executes tests in SauceLabs's
cloud-based server farm after application deployments
- Initiated and enforced code coverage thresholds in all our builds
- Collaborated with DevOps peers to establish a "build once, deploy anywhere"
reality for the business
GE Capital
UI & Application Architect
2014-2015
GE Capital UI Architecture
Established UI & application architecture standards across the enterprise
while leading development teams
- Defining and evangelizing UI architecture, technologies, and design patterns
for the enterprise
- Devised a portable application architecture with a Java/Spring MVC API
back-end, and a Backbone JS front-end
- Establishing UI performance engineering best practices like webserver
configuration and pre-deploy build processes to bundle/minify JS, CSS, HTML,
and image resources
- Establishing code quality best practices of syntax validation, code
beautification, and unit test automation using NodeJS, Grunt, Karma,
JasmineJS, JS
- Establishing continuous integration processes, and pipeline jobs to scan for
code quality and automate deployments
- Mentored developers to expand their knowledge base, and provide them
opportunities to gain hands-on experience
- Established a web application boilerplate, leveraging modern frameworks,
which comes with design patterns, code quality, and performance engineering
already baked in. This enables a quick start to project teams, and promotes
consistency across them
- Member of enterprise architecture review board to evaluate technologies, and
decide whether to adopt, move off, or avoid
- Leading the application development for a dealership inventory analytics
platform to provide decision making capabilities around their inventory,
their competition, and their customer demographics
- Integration with geospatial technologies to highlight POI boundaries, and
decision-making demographic data
- Designing fully responsive applications to provide the best user experience,
based on the device (phone, tablet, laptop/desktop)
- Implemented app-server caching to dramatically improve performance of
services
GE Capital
Front-End Development Lead
2012-2014
Working with architects & peers to understand architectures and create effective design patterns to mentor junior & contract developers
- Designing and implementing our client-side MV* architecture in Backbone
& RequireJS, which allows for normal or publish/subscribe based routing.
This is used for full pages, modals, and wizards.
- Establishing and enforcing UI coding standards for JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
- Leading a team of 10 UI developers, assigned out to 8 different agile/scrum
teams
- Partnering with UX designers to vet out visual designs & arrive at
mutual design patterns
- Responsible for client-side performance strategy, which includes: caching,
concatenation, minification, compression & local storage
- Object-Oriented JavaScript development
- Using common design patterns in JavaScript, like the observer (pub/sub), and
mediator patterns to increase modularity of code while reducing areas of
tight coupling
- Researched, selected, and implemented a JavaScript unit testing framework
with JasmineJS
- Conducting code reviews, according to standards, best practices, and design
patterns
- Developed a single-page search application, based on existing service APIs,
to reduce coupling, and improve performance through asynchronous file
loading, and file caching with local storage
- Implemented a fully interactive data grid that allows for advanced features
like: fixed columns, fixed headers, drag & drop columns, resizable
column widths, hidden columns, arrow key navigation, and cell formatters
& editors (based on type, text, date, completion, etc.)
GE Capital
Senior IT Business Analyst / Agile Coach
2005-2012
Working with customers and user groups to extract & document requirements,
them facilitate the execution of the solution development
- Coaching agile development project teams throughout iterations (planning,
standups, demos & retrospectives)
- Leading project teams, consisting of developers, architects, creative
designers (UX), functional testers, subject matter experts, and stakeholders
- Managing product release schedules and ongoing software development for
business-critical enterprise-wide, customer-facing web applications
- Project management essentials, such as defining scope, devising budgets,
forming/hiring teams, and the daily management of resources
- Facilitating single & multiple teams to create detailed deployment
plans. Also, tracking to the execution of the tasks of these plans during
the deployment, while factoring in appropriate checkpoints
- Making day-to-day design, development, and usability decisions for web
applications that are heavily used by customers and internal employees alike
- Coordinating development teams & project resources across various
locations (MN, MI, CT, and India). These resources consisted of employees
and multiple different vendors
- Acted as a project manager, development lead, or business analyst in the
development of numerous web applications, and a few batch applications
- Facilitating requirement sessions in small, medium, and large groups, using
both iterative and waterfall methodologies
- Documenting business requirements via documents/requirements management
tools, process flows, functional specifications, use cases, or mockups to
build brand new applications or enhance existing ones
- Managing expectations, timelines and scope with project champions &
stakeholders
- Conducting formal interviews and observations with user groups for the
purposes of researching the best solutions to meet the needs of the users