Amer Zec, M.S.

ABOUT

Innovative Staff Software Engineer with expertise in building modular, clean-code systems and high-performance APIs, currently focused on growing skills in Go, K8S, CNCF projects and Platform Engineering. Fifteen years of total software experience with four in overseeing and managing teams on complex projects. I thrive in autonomous environments that prioritize engineering over bureaucracy, with focus on creative problem-solving and minimal management. Proficient in multiple languages, SQL/NoSQL and CI/CD. I am a self-motivated professional dedicated to delivering high-quality, scalable solutions while quickly mastering new technologies and approaches.

CORE COMPETENCIES

• Coaching • Mentoring • Technical Leadership • Software Development • Project Management • Agile SDLC • Cloud Native Technologies • Performance Optimization • Architecture and Systems Design  • Platform Engineering

TECHNICAL PROFICIENCIES

AI Tools: GitHub Copilot, ollama, LMStudio, Continue.dev, cline, Claude Haiku 4.5, Qwen2.5-Coder, Claude Sonnet 4.5
Languages: Go, Java, Python, Bash, Groovy, HCL, TypeScript, Node.js
Cloud: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure
DBs: PostgreSQL, MySQL, DynamoDB,  MongoDB,  Redis, CouchDB
Other Technologies: Linux, Docker, K8S, Terraform, CloudFormation, Git, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitOps, ArgoCD, oTel, Splunk, Newrelic, DataDog, SignalFX, Prometheus,  Grafana,  ELK, Kafka

EXPERIENCE

Capital One Financial Corp, McLean, VA (Remote)
Lead Software Engineer (01/2023 - Present)

Technical manager level role, with 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.

• Provided technical mentorship for multiple engineers on my team, sister teams and teams outside of our immediate org, in 30% capacity

• Created automation tooling, primarily using Golang in the form of CLIs, that powered several iterations of migrations of in-house compliant OCI images. From Ubuntu to Alpine based images, then to Distroless images and then finally Chainguard images. The original toolset served as a platform with periodic inner-sourced contributions from external teams. This tooling empowered few hundred engineers to stay compliant with latest enterprise image security and vulnerability remediation requirements, with almost no effort, estimating four thousand engineering hours saved

• Drove the adoption of ECS/Fargate from 3% to 70% in my org, by using Golang, Bash, Linux, Terraform, to improve existing CI/CD gaps and create new migration tooling to fit org’s specific use-cases. Created multiple guides and technical documentation, and hosted internal hands-on migration day workshops to facilitate the process. Impact is total reduction of time for 30+ teams that they previously spent managing their AWS infrastructure if they stayed on ECS/EC2

• Led a team of five to upgrade a set of Java and Golang services used in GovID+Selfie authn flows for Capital One’s commercial client mobile apps, resulting with workflow simplification, faster throughput and modernized maintainable solutions that met pre-existing as well as new functional requirements

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

Led DevOps and platform initiatives and set technical direction for infrastructure foundations in the NBI line of business.

• Introduced GitOps and OpenTelemetry paradigms to the existing K8S workloads

• Architected and implemented a K8S based platform using AWS EKS and Terraform, resulting in modern-day orchestration platform, serving four tenants/businesses and 2K customers

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

Established first solid DevOps initiatives and footprints, such as IaC stacks maintenance, monitoring, secrets management, K8S migrations and resource optimizations.

• Deployed and operated core infrastructure on AWS, utilizing Terraform, powering twenty services and supporting backend and frontend teams for two startup businesses acquired by Verizon (IncubedIT and SkyWard)

• Migrated multiple production AWS EKS clusters from EOL version 1.16 to 1.21, preventing forced auto-updates, ensuring business continuity for 200 customers, and enabling modern features like Spot Instances, new CNI, and autoscaling

• Core contributor on new in-house CI / CD platform capable of deploying a variety of application & service blueprints and infrastructure code, using CircleCI Orbs, CircleCI Contexts and Terraform

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

• Designed system and architecture and then implemented in Golang, zero-downtime migration toolset powering MongoDB cluster migrations. The goal was to move from monolith to managed, microservice-scoped MongoDB clusters, cutting AWS EC2 costs by 60%, eliminating maintenance, and doubling reliability for critical services

• To empower engineering experience with monitoring critical services, created and deployed chat-ops solutions, utilizing Slack APIs, AWS Lambda and AWS Athena, to enable querying of logs generated by AWS services – CloudFront, WAF, ALB access logs

• To empower engineering experience with DB access, automated IAM and escalation of privileges for polyglot persistence (MongoDB, AWS RDS & DynamoDB) - utilizing Slack APIs, MongoDB cloud APIs, AWS IAM

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

As part of core horizontal team focused on cloud automation for a large  engineering community in Nike Digital Technologies, I had opportunity to contribute to multiple DevOps and infrastructure automation initiatives

• Customized internal fork of Netflix Asgard using Java/Spring/Groovy, to enable SSO/SAML authentication with multiple IdPs – Okta and OneLogin, which resulted in added SSO capability for 10 Asgard instances and used by 200 engineers, where no authentication previously existed

• Automated AWS infrastructure  provisioning using Terraform and Jenkins to enable on-demand self-service provisioning of new Jenkins clusters (multiple per team). This enabled 20 teams to spin new CI/CD clusters, utilizing AWS EC2 Spot Instances

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

• Authored eight backend RESTful services utilizing ASP.NET Core web API and hosted on Azure, that powered business logic for multiple e-signature plugins for major CRMs (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM)

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

• Contributed two major RESTful web services using Java, Spring Boot, Hibernate and PostgreSQL with <10ms latencies each, that empowered transactional processing, ingestion and cleaning of geo data from multiple clients (Google Maps, Apple Maps, YELP) into LCMS (location content management system)

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

• Contributed locations data batch jobs, processing large volumes, written in Java and deployed on Hadoop with persistence on HBase, empowering Nokia’s HERE maps data sourcing

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Certification

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

• AWS Certified Developer – Associate

• AWS Workshops, AWS Skills Builder and AWS Re:Invent conferences

Self-learning

• Numerous courses from OReilly Learning, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, AWS Skills Builder, aCloudGuru, LinuxAcademy, etc.

• Multiple AWS RE:Invent conferences

• StackOverflow profile:  https://stackoverflow.com/users/126382/azec-me

• TopCoder profile: https://profiles.topcoder.com/ZeKoU

EDUCATION