Will K.

Principal Software Engineer

Washington, District of Columbia, United States

About

I have built a reputation as a competent developer with good instincts and insights. My experience and leadership over the last 25 years at Fortune 500 companies, startups, and in collaborative open-source projects position me to discover inefficiencies or opportunities in existing systems and design and build solutions that greatly improve a range of environments. Specifically, I am most valuable in roles where I can increase developer productivity and scale systems. I've operated across several environments, including enterprise healthcare applications, marketing platforms, mobile application management solutions, automotive over-the-air update systems, and blockchain, with expertise in back-end and front-end development, security, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). My primary tech stacks are Java, Spring, Rust, and JavaScript/TypeScript, and I am passionate about learning new languages and frameworks. I am a strong advocate of open-source software, with a robust GitHub portfolio, accessible here: https://github.com/wkennedy/

Experience

  • Software Architect at Benefit Communications Inc.
    Jan 2024 - Present · 2 yrs 6 mos

    Security Improvement: Migrated applications from using credentials in configuration files to Azure Managed Identities. Security Refactoring: Transitioned the security stack from a custom solution to Azure B2C and MSAL. Application Enhancement: Implemented health check endpoints to monitor application status. Build and Deployment Optimization: Established build pipelines, resulting in faster builds and deployments. These achievements demonstrate a strong focus on enhancing security, efficiency, and reliability in software applications.

  • Principal Software Engineer at BryteLands
    Sep 2023 - Present · 2 yrs 10 mos

    Designing and implement custom blockchain solutions.

  • Freelance Software Engineer at Self Employed - Software Engineer
    Dec 2022 - Sep 2023 · 10 mos

  • Senior Software Engineer at General Motors
    Jun 2017 - Nov 2022 · 5 yrs 6 mos

    Worked on the OTA (over the air) solution to manage and update vehicle software. Participated in the migration of an existing system to an event driven architecture. This included refactoring existing micro-services to use spring-integration and supported the maintenance of a development Kafka cluster. Developed a product to describe, validate and manage configurations for microservices as they get deployed through the pipeline. This minimizes costly misconfigurations before they happen. Developed a product to trace messages as they flowed through the system through various pub-sub messaging platforms in order to help developers and QA with debugging, testing and monitoring. Created many new micro-services using Spring projects such as spring-boot, spring-integration, and spring-data deployed to static virtual machines and PCF.

  • Senior Software Engineer Technical Lead at HelloWorld, Inc.
    Jan 2016 - Jun 2017 · 1 yr 6 mos

    Implemented REST services and batch jobs using Spring Boot and various other Spring modules. Created many successful online promotions for top tier clients using Perl and in house frameworks. Created an API for 3rd parties to access promotion data using Java technologies such as jOOQ and RestExpress. Mavenized Java applications on legacy build frameworks.