Amer Zec, M.S.

ABOUT

Hands-on engineering manager, currently obsessing with Go, K8S, CNCF projects and Platform Engineering. 15 years of total software experience with 4 in overseeing and managing teams on complex projects that shipped and scaled in production. I believe the best software is a product of a fun environment and cohesive teams. I also believe that GenAI tools are a great asset in boosting productivity which I gladly use for daily work since the inception.

CORE COMPETENCIES

Software Development • Project Management • Agile SDLC • Requirements Assessments • Cloud Native Technologies • Troubleshooting • Performance Optimization • Architecture and Systems Design • Coaching

TECHNICAL PROFICIENCIES

GenAI tools - GitHub Copilot, ollama, LMStudio, Continue.dev, cline •  SOTA LLM models - Qwen2.5-Coder, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Codestral, Llama 3 • Go • Java • Python • Bash • IaC – CloudFormation, Terraform • Linux • Networking • API development – HTTP / RESTful, gRPC, GraphQL • OpenAPI • DDD • TDD • BDD • AWS • Docker • Kubernetes • PostgreSQL • DynamoDB • MongoDB • Redis • Git • GitHub Actions • CircleCI • Jenkins • GitOps – FluxCD, ArgoCD • oTel • o11y • Monitoring – Newrelic, DataDog, SignalFX • Prometheus • Grafana • ELK

EXPERIENCE

CapitalOne, McLean, VA
Software Engineering Manager, Remote (01/2023 - Present)

Manager level, 70% hands-on IC, 30% technical direction and influence across horizontal teams. Focused on improving operational capabilities for Identity Platform, serving consumer and small bank customers.

• Mentored multiple engineers, on my team and outside of it

• Influenced my organization regarding “shift-left” best practices

• Automated multiple horizontal initiatives using Go language resulting in operational configurations standardized across 160 repositories and reducing “run the engine” cost for application teams by 40%

• Automated and implemented tooling for migration of services from ECS/EC2 to ECS/Fargate. Served as main facilitator and SME for migration, through hosting of quarterly workshops. The impact was an increase from 3% to 70% in adoption of AWS Fargate (enterprise goal) for my vertical

• Designed and automated internal tooling based on OpenRewrite to support:

  • • Java services migrating from JDK 11 to JDK 17 & JDK 21

    • Java services migrating from Spring Boot 2.X to Spring Boot 3.X

The Impact is 12 teams and 30 services meeting enterprise goals to eliminate EOL tech-debt, while enabling teams to focus on features development without interruption

• Performance improvements for 15 services, through influence in adoption observability and use of oTel

• Leveraged GitHub Copilot to rapidly refactor multiple Java / Spring Boot services while porting over most of the functional features into new verification domain policies and staging services for decommissioning. The outcome is simplified and easier to understand architecture, less burden on teams to keep multiple services in KTLO for a marginally small number of edge-case customers (running identity verification from Apple devices)

VERIZON, Portland, OR
Principal Software Engineer - Platform, Remote (01/2022 - 01/2023)

Oversaw platform engineering and set technical direction for infrastructure foundations in the NBI line of business.

• Introduced GitOps and observability paradigms to the existing K8S workloads

• Architected and implemented a K8S-based platform using AWS EKS, Terraform and multiple other tools. The impact is modern-day orchestration platform, serving 4 tenants (businesses) in NBI LOB and over 2000 customers.

VERIZON (Skyward), Portland, OR
Senior Software Engineer,  Remote (11/2020 - 01/2022)

Facilitated improvements of the existing DevOps initiatives, such as IaC stacks maintenance, monitoring, secrets management, K8S migrations and resource optimizations. All work performed for a single business, a startup acquired by Verizon.

• Served as core AWS cloud infrastructure engineer. Impact is always evolving and improved infrastructure powering over 20 services

• Led the migration of multiple K8S clusters in production from AWS EKS 1.16 to AWS EKS 1.21. Impact is prevention of the auto-update from the EOL version by AWS and continuity of business operations for 200 customers. Secondary impact - workloads running on modernized cluster with benefits of: new control plane, node groups based EC2 Spot Instances, replacement of CNI, introduction of Cluster Autoscaler.

• Led the integration of CircleCI with GitHub. Developed new CircleCI Orbs and leveraged CircleCI Contexts together with Terraform. Impact is streamlined CI / CD pipelines capable of deploying a variety of application/service blueprints and infrastructure code, used as a go-to service catalog by teams and leading to cuts in engineering and operational costs. 

CBT NUGGETS,  Bend, OR
Senior Software Engineer, Remote (06/2018 - 11/2020)

Focused on engineering around DevOps practices while supporting the web product mainly developed with Python, TypeScript and Node.JS

• Implemented first chat-ops solutions, allowing:

  • querying of logs generated by multiple AWS services (CloudFront, WAF, ALB access logs) - utilizing Slack APIs and AWS Athena

  • automated IAM and escalation of temporary access privileges for polyglot persistence (MongoDB, AWS RDS, AWS Aurora, AWS Redshift, and AWS DynamoDB) - utilizing Slack APIs, MongoDB cloud APIs, AWS IAM

Impact was real-time insights into web front-end issues and reduction of engineering time spent on IAM

• Architected and implemented solution for zero-downtime, automated migrations of self-managed monolith MongoDB clusters, to domain-isolated (microservice-style) small and managed MongoDB clusters adhering to 12-factor app principles. Outcomes are 50% reduction of costs for compute & storage in AWS, 100% reduction of engineering costs of maintenance (due to move from self-managed to managed solution) and 100% increase in reliability (due to elimination of single point of failure used by product critical services, despite of replication)

NIKE DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES, Beaverton, OR
Senior Software Engineer, On-site (02/2017 - 06/2018)

Worked on a horizontal team focused on cloud automation for a large  engineering community in Nike Digital Technologies.

• Contributor in the implementation of next-gen CI / CD platform based on Jenkins 2.0 with the goal of having fully automated on-demand provisioning of Jenkins instances in AWS that can be used by any number of engineering teams. This entails integration with other enterprise services including SSO, AD, and IAM. Wrote supporting Java services, supporting several customized Jenkins plugins. Leveraged Python and Bash scripting, AWS CloudFormation and Terraform for automated rollouts. Outcome is adoption of this new CI/CD platform by 5 engineering teams, for the duration of my tenure in this role

• Customized internal fork of Netflix Asgard (control plane for AWS deployments management later replaced with spinnaker.io), to enable SSO/SAML authentication with multiple IdPs (Okta and OneLogin). Result is added capability for SSO for software used by 200 engineers, where no authentication previously existed

COMPUSIGHT CORP, Seattle, WA
Lead Software Engineer, On-site (08/2015 - 01/2017)

NOKIA HERE, Chicago, IL
Lead Software Engineer, On-site (03/2012 - 08/2015)

NOKIA HERE, Chicago, IL
Senior Software Engineer, On-site (03/2010 - 03/2012)

EDUCATION

Master of Science (M.S.), Computer Science
ETF, University of Sarajevo

CERTIFICATIONS AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT