John Zeller - Staff Software Engineer, Ampla

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Work Background

AmplaStaff Software Engineer

Jan. 2024None · Remote- Technical lead and architect for major cards processor integration. - Led technical development of new banking integrations. - Collaborated with engineering manager to plan / execute our banking engineering roadmap.

AmplaSoftware Engineering Manager

Oct. 2022 - Dec. 2023None · Remote- Managed 5 engineers (mid to senior) on the Cards team. - Architect / lead for our 1st charge card product, scaling from scratch to over $10m+ transaction volume. - Lead architect for cash-back rewards system. - Designed architecture for, heavily implemented, and led development of new banking integrations. - Hiring manager for cards team, led interview process, collecting feedback, and making hiring decisions. - Collaborated with stakeholders to plan / execute our banking engineering roadmap.

AmplaSoftware Engineering Manager

Apr. 2021 - Oct. 2022None · Remote- Managed 12 engineers (mid to senior) on Banking team. - Tech lead of our 1st banking platform, from scratch to $100m+ transaction volume by EOY. - Lead on our first 2 card products, growing to $2m+ transaction volume by EOY. - Interviewed and hired more than a dozen engineers, scaling engineering team 10x from ~6 to ~60. - Collaborated with stakeholders to plan / execute our banking engineering roadmap.

AmplaSoftware Engineer

Jul. 2020 - Apr. 2021None · Remote- Engineer #3 / Employee #9 - Developed Django Admin tools to drastically reduce the business team's client onboarding time. - Implemented lifecycle management for data integrations to automatically retry and maintain data flow. - Enhanced integrations with Plaid, Quickbooks, and Facebook. - Introduced a new integration with Freshdesk for automated issue tracking. - Running technical interviews for frontend and backend engineering candidates - Upgraded client-facing frontend, improving financial visualizations and account management features. - Maintained underwriting model w/ 3 engineers; enhanced error handling, monitoring, reporting, scalability.

MilkRunCo-Founder & CTO

Mar. 2020 - Jun. 2020Portland, Oregon Metropolitan AreaOversaw technical operations and scaled platform 15x, while going through TechStars and the pandemic.

UpdaterSoftware Engineer

Jul. 2017 - Mar. 2020Remote- 1st Engineer on the Platform team. - Expanded upon initial architecture plan for rebuilding user data acquisition system. - Lead engineer on "extract" part of ETL pipeline; used hybrid reactive microservices with Python / Docker. - Developed data acquisition systems to integrate client source systems, feeding data into the ETL pipeline. - Built several internal Python libraries for use by Python-based microservices. - Contributed to hiring for mid, senior, and director candidates. - Helped grow Platform team from 2 to 6 engineers. - Helped grow Data team from 2 to 5 engineers. - Collaborated on streaming pipeline (Scala / Apache Flink) and microservices for queuing invites - Collaborated on microservices for client configuration management. - Maintained legacy systems and designed migration strategies. - Assisted Data team with Airflow, Astronomer, Snowflake, and other platform dependencies.

DatadogSoftware Engineer

Jul. 2015 - Feb. 2017Greater New York City Area- Employee #120 - Worked on the integrations team, maintaining and building new integrations with using Python / JavaScript. - Contributed to Datadog Agent, as well as crawler and push-based integrations. - Led expansion of Google Cloud Platform support, increasing Google product support from 2 to 15+. - Developed Jenkins plugin in Java, contributing to various library enhancements.

Space AdvocatesFounder / Director

May. 2012 - Jun. 2015RemoteFounded non-profit corporation advocating for space exploration, increased funding for NASA and other space related research. to date our most successful campaign has been Penny4NASA which boasts a social media presence of more than 100,000 people across Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Manage team of 20 permanent volunteers. Operates largely online using a website, social media presence, government relations, and media relations, as well as taking monetary donations. To date the organization has risen upwards of $20,000 in non-tax-deductible donations, which has enabled the improvement of every aspect of the organization.

MozillaRelease Engineering Intern

Jun. 2014 - Sep. 2014San Francisco, CABuilt enhancements to an existing Flask application used to start the build process for Mozilla product releases ("Ship It"). These enhancements include providing realtime status updates available via REST API and human readable views, as well as steps to providing added post release triggering functionality to allow greater autonomy for release management.

MozillaRelease Engineering Consultant

Nov. 2013 - Jun. 2014Corvallis, Oregon AreaFurther developed existing "self serve" applications by adding functionality accessible by REST API. Added the ability to trigger arbitrary build sets for Mozilla product, which previously had to be triggered as a broader set of jobs; this enhancement allows for greatly improved agility when handling problems that crop up during a build. Also, introduced a new application called Tupperware which houses Release Engineering apps using Docker and Vagrant to make setup and development as easy as a few commands. This work greatly simplifies the task of development, especially for new contributors, who may have little to no knowledge of existing Release Engineering infrastructure.

Mozilla CorporationRelease Engineering Intern

Jun. 2013 - Sep. 2013San Francisco, CAPrimarily developed and maintained a REST API built on Pylons using Python, Mako, HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Designed and implemented various extensions such as returning a JSON response detailing build/test progress status, as well as displaying and reporting progress status. Contributed to several other areas, including design and implementation of Nagios scripts and Flot data visualizations, and diagnosing/finding solutions to various bugs.

OSU Mars Rover TeamTeam Lead / Software Lead

Sep. 2011 - Jun. 2013Build a 6-wheeled mobile robotic platform with robotic arm for competing in the University Rover Challenge (URC). As Team Lead, manage weekly meetings, coordinate project leads (i.e. Mechanical, Electrical, Software, Science), organize tasks, deadlines and goals, mailing lists, secure sponsorship, coordinating public events and recruitment activities. Channel between Rover Team members, OSU, the Mars Society and OSU Robotics Club Executives. As Software Lead, manage the software design process, create deadlines, goals, and delegate tasks. Oversee the proper implementation of software and the maintenance of repositories. Establish and use design review process for all projects.

Space Exploration TechnologiesAvionics Intern

Jun. 2012 - Sep. 2012Worked in the Hardware Development test group. Developed on an off-the-shelf embedded development platform to create a platform framework that integrated in-house boards and allowed for interfacing with existing hardware to accomplish custom testing procedures. Designed and implemented an onboard Django-based server for controlling and reviewing tests in real-time. The majority of this work was done in Python, with smaller portions being completed in HTML and JavaScript.

Oregon State University (Human Services Resource Center)Finance Coordinator

Jun. 2011 - Jun. 2012Managed budget of approximately $330,000 with responsibilities such as spending approval, depositing of donations, record keeping and account balancing/planning. I also built and managed the center's website which was developed in Drupal on the University's domain.

Portland Community CollegeStudent Senator

Oct. 2009 - Jun. 2010Portland, Oregon AreaAdvocated for student well-being on the federal, state and local level. Educated students about their education, rights and how they can effect change through voting. Ran voter registration drives where we registered students to vote, gaining 1,800+ over the course of a month or two.

ROOTS ProgramStudent Advisor

Jan. 2009 - Dec. 2010