Ronnie Taylor

As a Platform Team tech lead, I collaborated with engineers across the United States, Europe and Australia to deliver high-quality, scalable tools for education. Mentored teammates and integrated AI tools such as GitHub Copilot and local large language models to accelerate development velocity and improve code reliability. Partnered with third-party penetration-testing vendors to audit, document, and remediate application vulnerabilities. Guided the migration of CI/CD pipeline from CircleCI to GitHub Actions, significatnly improving build times.

Led key platform initiatives including extending the OAuth2 system to support various external authentication providers. Engineered a granular access-management system that cut employee onboarding and offboarding time by half. Added internationalization to core applications enabling the company to serve global internal customers without separate codebases. Collaborated with DevOps to modernize AWS infrastructure, improving scalability and reliability. Standardized Docker images for MSSQL databases, allowing developers to spin up local environments instantly.

Led a high-performing team delivering mission-critical APIs, payment processing, and internal services. Instituted test-driven development, increasing automated test coverage from near 0% to roughly 85%. Spearheaded the organization's first CI/CD pipeline on CircleCI, cutting deployment times by 70%. Mentored junior engineers and maintained 99.99% uptime.

Partnered with senior colleagues to upgrade and extend a tuition and incidentals payment platform that processes over a billion dollars annually. Enhancements increased system availability to 99.998% and tightened security controls. Implemented robust monitoring and support processes that reduced downtime incidents by 40%.

Led development of a web service that enabled a proprietary app-virtualization tool to move Windows applications across data centers, using Ruby, Sinatra, Rails, PostgreSQL, and AWS. Partnered with executive leadership, sales, and product engineering to deliver a robust solution that accelerated customer migrations, reduced downtime, and increased customer satisfaction. Shaped the overall architecture of the Zapp platform to meet stringent scalability, reliability, and security standards.

Ran a web-development consultancy serving clients across the United States and Canada, building and deploying custom sites with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. A responsive e-commerce platform delivered for a retailer grew online sales by 20% in the first quarter. Implemented SEO best practices and CMS solutions (Drupal, WordPress, CodeIgniter).