Brent Scheffler

Ethos

Engineering Manager, January 2022 - Present

Ethos is an online life insurance provider with a mission statement of "protecting the next million families."

• Designed and lead technical initiative of integrating Tomorrow (see below) and Ethos systems and users.
• Manage a team of eight engineers across backend, frontend, and iOS.
• 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 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 projects to adopt event driven pattern
• Member and contributor to Engineering Review Board, focusing on infra and architectural excellence and planning across company
• Identify and execute on opportunities to iterate on team process and development to deliver better results with better efficiency

Tomorrow Ideas (acquired by Ethos)

Director of Technology, May 2021 - January 2022

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 micro services
  • Containerization using ECR & ECS
  • 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

Principal Architect, November 2019 - May 2021

Lead Engineer, August 2018 - November 2019

Sr. Software Engineer, November 2016 - August 2018

Zulily

Sr. Software Engineer, Site Services August 2012 - November 2016

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

• Payments backend lead: versed in SOX and PCI
• Built mobile API from ground-up to support new version of mobile apps (iPad/iPhone & Android)
• Built RESTful API to support internal business services

Playmark

Sr. Software Engineer April 2012 - July 2012

Playmark was a start-up focused on simplifying the NFL licensing process by creating a completely digital experience.

• Lead development on and completed mobile app API
• Event tracking integration using KissMetrics
• Implemented significant gains in application performance by integrating various caching strategies (APC and Memcache)
• Tracked performance gains using New Relic service

Wonderful Union

Software Engineer June 2008 - April 2012

Wonderful Union is 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. Significant projects included:

• Internal business management system (user and admin management, product, inventory, and warehouse management, order fulfillment, customer support, financial reports, etc); built in ZendFramework
• End-to-end redesign and implementation of company order fulfillment process: including restructuring data model, integrating 3rd party shipping APIs, and setting up warehouse hardware

WindowsSecrets.com

Web Developer June 2005 - June 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 manage web site and e-mail servers
• Develop new applications and automate day-to-day business practices
• Web server is RHEL5 with Apache, MySQL, and PHP
• Notable projects: extracting static archived HTML content into indexed & searchable content persisted in a database
• Parsing of HTML files to extract data using regular expression pattern matching

KEXP 90.3 FM

Web Developer Intern May 2005 - June 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 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. Responded to faculty and student trouble-tickets.

Cal Poly Humboldt / CS Department

Internet Teaching Lab T.A. August 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.