Amer Zec, M.S.

ABOUT

I am a hands-on technical leader with passion for many technologies. Disciplined, language-agnostic, positive and energetic engineer, offering expertise in developing, documenting, and testing software to ensure that it meets the needs of end users and achieves business goals. Versatile in using various software development methodologies. Proficient in a wide spectrum of cloud technologies. Effective communicator and problem-solving leader, known not only for individual contribution, but also mentoring, building and accelerating teams, growing developer’s communities of practice / guilds and building relationships with internal and external partners at all levels. I have 2+ years of experience in overseeing and managing teams in all areas on complex projects, from design, through development using multiple languages and frameworks, all the way to scaling solutions in production. I have the ability to persuade and manage others to adopt new structures or systems in order to meet objectives. Collaborative, empathetic and autonomous leader with demonstrated successes in partnering with engineering stakeholders and cross-functional teams from multiple domains when solving not only problems of team-local importance, but to the organization as a whole. Capable of creating a plan, breaking it into incremental milestones and producing non-existing backlogs meeting the required level of quality. Enthusiastic for opportunities to set and present the technical direction and putting right tools and technologies in the best use, to maintain / upgrade / improve the functionality of all existing software, recommend process improvements in resolving software issues, and to ensure that the design, application, and maintenance of software meets the requirements of the customers. My last few experiences were on platform teams, while I still maintain strong competencies in other areas of software engineering.

CORE COMPETENCIES

Requirements Assessments • Systems Design • Complexity Analysis • Data Structures and Algorithms • Cloud Native • Development • Troubleshooting • Test-driven Design • Risk Identification / Mitigation • Compliance • Software Architecture Best Practices • DevOps • Agile • SDLC • InnerSource • OpenSource • Continuous Process Improvements • Training • Documentation • Leading Teams • Managing Software Projects

TECHNICAL PROFICIENCIES

Java • Python • Bash • Go Language • JS • TypeScript • Node.JS • DevOps • Infrastructure As Code (IaC) • Scrum and Kanban • CI / CD • Peer Code Review • Unit / Integration Testing • Linux - Alpine, RedHat, Amazon Linux 2, Debian • Modern networking - VPC, VLAN, Subnetting, VPN, NAT, DNS, TCP, UDP, HTTP, TLS • Microservice Architecture • Event-driven Architecture • APIs – HTTP / RESTful, gRPC, GraphQL • OpenAPI / Swagger • Domain Design • TDD • BDD • AWS - EC2, Lambda, EKS, ECS, DynamoDB, RDS / Aurora, S3, EBS, EFS, Batch, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, API Gateway • Azure • Docker • Kubernetes • CloudFormation • Terraform • Packer • Ansible • SQL • PostgreSQL • MongoDB • Git • GitHub / GitHub Actions • Spacelift • GitLab CI/CD • CircleCI • Jenkins • GitOps – FluxCD / ArgoCD • Observability • Monitoring • systemd • journald • collectd • statsd • fluentd • fluentbit • Riemann • Graphite • Prometheus • OpenTelemetry • DataDog • SignalFX • NewRelic • Grafana • Elasticsearch / Logstash / Kibana - ELK stack • Google Workspaces / Meet • Zoom • Google Docs • Microsoft Office

CERTIFICATION

• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) - PDF CERTIFICATE

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate (SOA) - PDF CERTIFICATE

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA) - PDF CERTIFICATE

• AWS Certified Developer – Associate PDF CERTIFICATE 

EXPERIENCE

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

As a manager,  I am responsible for leading three teams and alignment of the technical direction on multiple initiatives. My primary horizontal platform team is responsible for all DevOps/SRE & Infrastructure projects for 30 other application development teams.  Within the scope of my primary team, I am 70% hands-on with individual contribution and 30% on providing technical direction, which involves establishing a technical vision, resolving technical disagreements and managing the technical quality of team deliverables. Within the scope of my other two teams, I am 100% on effective technical leadership ensuring teams use appropriate engineering practices (such as CI/CD and automated testing), invest in continual improvements to tooling or technical debt, and that the internal systems evolve to meet the changing needs and environment. 

• Growing and leading team members in technical and people skills

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

• Contributed to enterprise-wide enrollments, offering technical expertise in microservices design and implementation

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

• Automation of all horizontal initiatives (static code analysis, CI/CD configurations and standardization) using Go language and delivered to over ~200 repositories

• Facilitating smooth migration of services running on AWS ECS/EC2 to AWS ECS/Fargate. Created POCs, high-quality documentation with best practices and migration playbooks. Facilitating and running AWS Fargate migration workshops with SMEs

• Contributing to and influencing decisions on enterprise-wide adopted tools used for:

  • • migrations of CI/CD pipeline configs from legacy standards (deprecated) to the newest (allowing teams to focus less on tech debt and more on business problems of owned services)

    • migrations of CI/CD pipeline configs from deploying  in ECS/EC2 to deploying in ECS/Fargate (allowing teams to focus less on operational & infrastructure areas and more on business problems of owned services)

• Contributing and maintaining internal tooling which relies on customizations of OpenRewrite recipes 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

• Contributing and influencing early stages of Observability adoption through the use of OpenTelemetry

• Resolving performance and vulnerability issues to meet the team compliance

• Influenced engineering patterns and practices through contributions to internal tooling, by better aligning their implementations with industry best practices; e.g. requiring branch protections on critical release branches and avoiding unnecessary re-deployments to development environments

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

Oversaw platform engineering and set technical direction for infrastructure foundations on AWS leveraging contemporary DevSecOps paradigms and practices.

• Improved DevSecOps culture and acceleration at Verizon NBI by introducing GitOps and Observability paradigms to the early platform design and planning.

• Improved planning and organization of communities of practice in group of 20 engineers, most proudly by introducing architectural decision records / ADRs.

• Delivered numerous POCs of high importance to the new platform architectural guidelines, most proudly:

  • GitLab CI/CD OpenID Connect authentication and authorization with AWS EKS clusters, demonstrating capabilities of OIDC and its use with AWS IAM and Kubernetes RBAC.

  • GitLab CI/CD builds and deployments of new container images in Kubernetes runners, demonstrating ability to bypass and avoid docker-in-docker execution model with use of Google’s Kaniko tooling.

• Refactored and improved observability of multiple microservices of mission-critical importance to the numerous business units.

• Built and influenced the tools and utilities that are part of the developer tooling helping simplify day to day tasks

• Served as catalyst to deliver truly disruptive products that are growing rapidly within Verizon Robotics Business Technology portfolio 

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

Led foundational infrastructure development, maintenance. Initiated and facilitated improvements of DevOps culture by hosting a weekly meeting, the DevOps Round Table, championing an open-hour event for anyone to bring their topics of interest or concerns to the open agenda for discussion, covering themes such as observability, monitoring, secrets management, Kubernetes autoscaling.

• Led the effort of modernization and migration of the Kubernetes platform including production environments / multiple clusters, powering apps, and migrating all workloads from AWS EKS 1.16 to AWS EKS 1.21 

  • Prevented the auto-update of an unsupported version of EKS by AWS, rolled out a modern cluster with all benefits of the new control plane, and utilized node groups based on spot EC2 instances.

  • Improved CNI, logging, cluster observability and monitoring, and introduced the use of Cluster Autoscaler with node-group bidding priorities.

• Contributed continuous improvements in the development and operations of cloud infrastructure powering the apps, delivering quality services and products that were on time, on-scope, within budget, and per customer and regulatory (FAA) specifications. 

  • Managed AWS cloud services (SQS, SNS, SES, RDS, ElastiCache Redis, OpenSearch Service / formerly ELK), as well as unmanaged services including SonarCube, JFrog Artifactory, and RabbitMQ, and tooling including maintaining an in-house fork of kubesec, enabling it to operate with multiple other tools adopted by the team (such as vaulted and awsume), simplifying the delivery of infrastructure platform / tools that enabled and multiplied developers’ cloud-native experience. 

• Piloted on the effort of migrating codebase from BitBucket to GitHub VCS through automation and streamlined management of GitHub resources through IaC using Terraform.

  • Enabled better developer experience with the use of GitHub.

  • Improved security by secure management of GitHub service users and their various API Tokens, Personal Tokens, and SSH keys used by CI / CD bots. 

• Directed the effort on integrating CircleCI with GitHub with all important security posture considerations, ensuring proper mitigation of risk, alignment with corporate strategy.

  • Secured management of CircleCI Contexts through IaC using Terraform, the gatekeepers of the CI / CD system's access to other critical systems such as AWS.

  • Developed / deployed CircleCI Orbs with goal of streamlining CI / CD pipelines for all application code and infrastructure code, with orbs serving as go-to service catalog offering for service blueprints.

  • Leveraged migration to CircleCI / GitHub as an opportunity to improve the security model of CI / CD and reduce risks of exposing sensitive information and granting access to other systems 

• Stewarded the effort to improve the security posture of microservices powering the apps by introducing Kubernetes Service Accounts to be used by services and removing the need for AWS IAM-based authentication of services with AWS services 

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

Served as technical lead in multiple DevOps domains such as designing and implementing solutions for migrations of monolith MongoDB clusters and their compliance to microservice architectural guidelines. Setting technical direction in org-wide secrets management, edge traffic shaping and CDN. Influencing reduction of repetitive and routine DevOps work and cutting engineering costs through the use of chatops. 

• Influenced adoption and implemented first chat-ops solutions for near real-time analytics and querying of logs generated by multiple AWS services including CloudFront, WAF, and ALB access logs, utilizing Slack API and AWS Athena, providing near real-time insights into web front-end issues and challenges gained through Slack commands / SQL queries using AWS Athena.

• Designed and executed the migration of CDN from Akamai to AWS CloudFront, ensuring large cost savings that were gained by switching vendors, as well as reduced operational costs by using solutions native to AWS workloads.

• Designed and implemented Slack apps / chatbots as applications in AWS for the elevation of user privileges in all used database systems including MongoDB, AWS RDS, Aurora, AWS Redshift, and DynamoDB, providing considerable savings in DevOps engineering hours spent on credentials management and IAM.

• Architected, implemented and deployed a solution for executing automated migrations with zero downtime. Performed numerous migrations of self-managed MongoDB clusters, while breaking the monolith across multi-account AWS environments and enabling the team to better stick to 12-factor app principles, abandon monolith approach to databases and adopt microservice best practices for databases, leading to better governance and compliance with standards for managing PII data.

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

Designed and automated self-service of numerous developer tools as part of Cloud Automation team for large engineering community in Nike Digital Technologies. Implemented CI / CD pipelines for Jenkins 2.0, for deployments of containerized microservices with targets being AWS ECS, AWS ECS Fargate, and AWS EKS, enabling multiple engineering teams in Nike Digital organization to ripe benefits of microservices architecture and rapid deployments to the cloud while optimizing compute costs.

• Contributed implementation of next-gen CI / CD platform based on Jenkins 2.0, leading to fully automated provisioning / self-service of CI / CD platforms hosted in AWS cloud that was used by multiple engineering teams.

  • Wrote microservices and middleware for a large ecosystem of Jenkins plugins, Python / Bash scripts, and IaC (AWS CloudFormation / Terraform), enabling developers through automation to provision new highly available / reliable Jenkins 2.0 CI / CD platforms with out-of-the-box integration with other Nike enterprise services including SSO, AD, and IAM management.

• Improved implementation of tooling for automated static code analysis, automated builds, canary analysis, and Blue / Green deployments, enabling engineering teams to boost productivity and increase overall code quality.

• Adapted and modified internally used Netflix OSS tooling through the practice of inner sourcing, most significantly, enabling Netflix Asgard (deprecated and replaced with Spinnaker.io), a control plane for AWS deployments management, to authenticate with multiple SSO / SAML auth providers including Okta and OneLogin, and enabling engineering teams to use Single-Sign-On for better security of apps controlling deployments in AWS.

ADDITIONAL RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

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

BH TELECOM, Sarajevo, Bosnia
Lead Software Engineer, On-site (03/2012 - 08/2015)

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

EDUCATION

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

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

• Active tech writing at personal blog azec.me

• AWS Training and AWS Lab Days

• AWS Workshops and AWS Skills Builder

• AWS Re:Invent Conferences

• OReilly OSCON Conferences, Meetups, Webinars

• Continuous member (4+ years) of CloudPosse DevOps Community

AWARDS