Brent Scheffler

Engineering leader

I am an engineering leader with a background in backend services with significant experience in API and event driven distributed systems. I am results oriented with a strong bias toward action with a proven track record of delivery.

As a big proponent of opensource software, I contribute back to the community whenever I can. Check out some of the Code I've written and have made available via packagist.org.

In my free time I enjoy restoring vintage Vespas, gardening, and working on personal open source projects.

For those curious, here is my home office setup.

Education

Cal Poly Humboldt

B.S. Computer Information Systems

History

Remitz

Director of Engineering, Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 (contractor)

Remitz is a startup leveraging AI and ML models to process millions of health care records in the effort to identify and recover underpaid insurance claims for healthcare providers.

Built three software development teams: range of experience from junior to senior, across front and back ends
Provide guidance, mentorship, best practices, and continued training to teams
Define and enforce consistent SDLC processes and practices across all engineering teams resulting in better communication and understanding within product & business teams and easier developer portability to other teams
Architect, roadmap, and execute on engineering platform and tech stack
Implemented low friction deployments allowing engineering teams to move faster
Implemented monitoring and alerting systems and processes for engineering teams to own their code and its success post-deployment
Point person for execution of security related planning, tasks, and best practices partnering with security consultant
Work closely with product and business stakeholders to get alignment on priorities, iterate on vision and design, offering rough estimates on levels of effort, and making compromises when needed
Defined and enforce consistency in API design by using a schema first approach in OpenAPI, resulting in reliable and testable API contracts, automated code generation, and API documentation for internal teams
Defined & documented consistent event schema, implemented event bus, resulting in decoupling of services, sharing of data, and faster data processing
Contribute code as an IC when needed — I am not afraid to roll my sleeves up and dive into code when necessary

Ethos

Engineering Manager, Jan 2022 – Jan 2024

Remitz is a startup leveraging AI and ML models to process millions of health care records in the effort to identify and recover underpaid insurance claims for healthcare providers.

Manage a team of five engineers across back end & front end
- Educate and level-up team with weekly group“brown bag”sessions focused on software engineering theory, new technologies, and best practices
- Regular 1:1s with team members to help mentor and guide them in career growth
- Prepare and present technical team initiative proposals for quarterly OKRs
- Solution architect and general technical oversight for large and critical company projects
Identify and execute on opportunities to iterate on team process and development to deliver better results with better efficiency
Work with stakeholders on major projects to identify dependencies and potential breaking changes and coordinate work streams and timelines to achieve deadlines
Designed and lead technical initiative of integrating Tomorrow (see below) and Ethos systems and users
Lead a team in the first major initiative of migrating legacy systems to an event driven architecture in Golang, backed by Kafka
- Legacy service went from 3 hour (and growing) latency of data processing down to ~25 seconds
- Code architected in a scalable, reusable, and easily extensible solution to be used throughout org to help bootstrap other teams in adopting event driven pattern
Member and contributor to Engineering Review Board, focusing on infra, architectural, and operating excellence and planning across company

Tomorrow

Director of Engineering, Nov 2016 – Jan 2022 (acquired by Ethos)

Tomorrow was a start-up dedicated to making sure every American has access to a legal Will and Trust backed with the financial security of a life insurance policy. The product allowed users to generate estate planning documents that were customized for their family needs and state laws along with cross selling of life insurance products that were based on real recommendations according to their family needs.

First full-time hire for company, initially focusing on backend architecture, data model, and development
Lead technical role on acquisition team, focusing on documenting tech stack, infrastructure, practices, compliance, data flow, and responding to due diligence questionnaires
Oversaw technical and architectural decisions across organization, managed security audits, compliance, and remediation
Focused on optimizing and improving code quality and deployment process by using continuous integration and deployment with Github, Travis CI, and AWS
Lead initiative to break apart monolithic application into various API and event processing services
- Containerization using ECR & ECS Fargate
- Migrated API services to leverage OpenAPI schema as the source of truth using a deep integration via middleware
- Moved several key services to an event driven architecture pattern - decoupling them further from the core API
Lead, managed, and mentored a team of five engineers across front and back ends
Established best coding and engineering practices with unit testing & code coverage requirements, static analysis, and dependency CVE scanning
Partnered with estate planning attorneys to build templates for legal documents in 48 states and D.C.
Architected and built initial monolithic API using a RESTful (RMM Level 2) design pattern

Zulily

Sr. Software Engineer, Aug 2012 – Nov 2016

Zulily is an online retailer offering daily deals for Moms on everything from children's clothing, toys, furniture, and lots more.

Lead development of payment related backend services
- Worked closely with SOX controlled code bases and PCI compliant code bases
- Familiar with PCI audits and SOX change management controls
- Worked closely with security, book keeping, and fraud teams
Lead initiative to build a unified internal API around a large body of fragmented legacy code
Worked with new team to build a unified internal API around a large body of fragmented legacy code:
- The goal was to achieve data and implementation consistency across the various platforms employing a strictly defined and typed SDK that abstracts legacy code complexities and transport layer as well as removes direct database access from developers
- Designed a RESTful API interface and contract
- Provided a pre-built SDK for teams to use and include in their projects
Built mobile API from ground-up to support new version of mobile apps (iPad/iPhone & Android)
- API had full feature parity as website: browsing catalog, add items to cart, checkout, order history/status, etc.
- Worked closely with frontend app developers (iOS and Android)
Built dedicated push notification server using NodeJS that supports both APN and GCM protocols and implements a custom built Redis queuing library to handle batches of 2+ million pushes

Wonderful Union (acquired by Please & Thank You)

Software Engineer, Jun 2008 – Aug 2012

Wonderful Union was a social media and community engine for artists and celebrities and their fans with features like member accounts and profiles, blogs, discussion forums, ticketing & VIP experiences, and merchandising. I lead the developers and direction of development of all company projects.

Built custom multi-tenant framework in PHP that could be customized for each client offering:
- Web store for merch
- Blogs and updates from bands (clients)
- Fan discussion forums
- VIP experience ordering:
Built internal business management system:
- User and client management interfaces
- Product, inventory, and warehouse management, order fulfillment, customer support, financial reports, etc). Built in ZendFramework
Architected and lead end-to-end redesign and implementation of company order fulfillment process:
- Redefined fulfillment process from order placed to order shipped
- Restructuring of data model
- Deep integration with UPS APIs and shipping label printers
- Inventory tracking with barcodes
- Average fulfillment times dropped by 50%
Developed concert ticketing algorithm to select best available seats in a venue
Co-creator and lead developer of crowd(ctrl) (eventually acquired by Eventbrite) – a ticketing and venue management platform with ability to print concert tickets, manage will call lists, guest lists, and track venue capacity in realtime.

Windows Secrets Newsletter

Software Engineer, Jun 2005 – Jun 2008

The Windows Secrets Newsletter was a weekly e-mail newsletter about security related issues, especially in Microsoft products, including reviews of the latest patches from Microsoft.

Maintain and refactor existing legacy code
Technology stack is RHEL5 with Apache, MySQL, and PHP on a colocated server
Extracted over 5 years worth of newsletters from static archived HTML content into indexed & searchable content persisted in a database
- Developed new process to accept incoming content from editors (MS Word and HTML formats) and extract content and push to database
- This same content would be used to assemble e-mail newsletter
Built subscription funnel, integrating with Paypal for credit card transactions
Built custom ad auction process to purchase ad space on website and within e-mail newsletter
Parsing of HTML files to extract data using regular expression pattern matching

KEXP 90.3 FM

Web Developer Intern, May 2005 – Jun 2005

Assist the webmaster with all aspects of web development on KEXP.org, both external and internal sites. Site developed in ASP, SQLServer, and JavaScript. Last project included developing content and layouts for wireless devices such as cell phones and PDAs.

Cal Poly Humboldt / ITS Department

IT Assistant, May 2002 – May 2003

Administered and maintained lab servers and workstations for the College of Natural Resources and Sciences
User profile management via Windows NT PDC and Linux file servers via SMB and NFS
Built dual boot (XP and Linux) workstation prototypes and imaged entire labs using Ghostcast
Various hardware upgrades and installations when needed
Pulled over 1000' of CAT5 cable, hand cut & crimped
Responded to faculty and student trouble-tickets

Cal Poly Humboldt / Computer Science Department

Internet Teaching Lab T.A., Aug 2001 – May 2003

Installed, configured, and prepared labs for instructors:
- Lab contains enterprise networking equipment (Cisco 7000 series routers and 3Com, Cisco, and HP switches) for student and faculty use
- Lab is isolated from campus backbone allowing students a hands-on approach to networking and faculty a chance to design labs that would otherwise compromise security
Administered RedHat Linux DNS, DHCP, and SMB file servers as well as dual boot workstation image management
Repairing and reconfiguring equipment after each lab session