Bellevue University

Entrepreneur, Technology Executive, and Investor

Flower Mound, Texas, United States

Have operated as an independent consultancy during this period. Provided consulting services, leadership and assistance in leadership, cloud, DevOps, solutions, transformations, and design/architecture services for numerous clients. In most cases, reported directly to C-Level executives including: Directors, Vice Presidents, Chief Executive and Technology Offices, and Chief Security Officers. The following includes many of my clients and my roles during those tenures.

Mentoritek

Managing Partner, Founder

- Responsible for a $2.2M budget in Azure cloud space.•	Initially managed the Web Application Teams, assisted in building out a Texas team, and mentored/coached the team, which consisted of 20+ members.•	Built the cloud and DevOps team in order to migrate all applications from two global data centers to the Azure cloud space.•	Assisted in designing and provisioning infrastructure to support the migration of SAP ECC from On-Prem to Azure Cloud•	Assisted in designing and provisioning infrastructure in a new Spoke to support SAP S/4Hana.•	Applied new technologies like API, microservices, cloud and analytics to solve real-life problems.•	Helped to develop proposals and respond to RFP/Statement of Compliance as an API Subject Matter Expert during bid stage.•	Remained technical skills by developing (hands-on) demos and proof-of-concept solutions using API Management platforms and various microservice stack, including Azure Functions, Web App Service, and Kubernetes (AKS)•	Managed the relationships with our vendors.•	Provided budgets, presentations and technology reviews for C-Level management.•	Provided a design and toolset to the DevOps personnel for performing automated Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. My pipeline also included Continuous Testing, Monitoring, and Deployment to various environments.•	Played a core role in designing the Digital architecture to ensure future proofing.•	Assisted in the conversion of existing applications from traditional legacy-based web apps running on bare-metal servers and VMs to modern Native Cloud solutions, utilizing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Database as a Service (DaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) APIs. •	Involved at the enterprise level to determine future roadmap and architectures in an effort to ensure that all new functionality will be consistent with our standards and compliances.

Kubota Tractor Corporation

Role: Chief Solutions Architect, Lead for Cloud and DevOps Team

Project: Worked on a new website for Bonotel.•	Definition6 provides R&D (including website, ecommerce, social media marketing, etc.) to their clients.•	My role as a Tech Lead/Team Lead/Tech Manager/Developer/Architect in Java included the responsibility to provide:•	Overall Architecture and Vision•	Technology Selection and Solutioning•	Leadership and Mentoring•	Design and Implementation of REST APIs (including payload/model design)•	Frontend user interface design•	Backend development using Content Management System (CMS), Java, JCR•	Authentication/Authorization/SSO•	Search functionality using SOLR/Lucene•	Location/Geo based searches using Google Places API•	Designs and assisted with the Continuous Integration/Delivery pipeline•	Assisted in the design of our digital cloud infrastructure

Definition6

Role: Technical Lead for Solutions and Architecture Team

- Supported and contributed artifacts (such as user interface design components and code) for their client facing, premier suite of digital product and services, which provide document management of both online documents as well as physical documents.•	Assisted in the development of the user personas.•	Provided wireframes and architecture.•	Created test scenarios for user testing.•	The online tool suite uses a SaaS filesystem, called via REST APIs, a Governance platform, which was stood up in the cloud, and a series of SaaS services (including SalesForce, PeopleSoft, and some custom legacy .NET services). •	Designed and architected solutions using full-stack development tools and technologies to enhance the system with new client requested features, across the enterprise using best-of-breed software practices and solutions combined with internal inhouse developed services. •	Architected and designed microservices to better utilize their existing REST APIs, decoupling the functionality across tiers and providing the ability to replace services with little or no impact on the remainder of the system. •	Design and assisted in the implementation, training, and support of new devops operations using Continuous Integration and Deployment practices. •	Assisted in Change Management, championing new practices to assist the company in transitioning from traditional waterfall model and practices to become more agile, and learn to follow Scrum/Agile practices. Provided workflow, documentation, team leadership, scrum master services, and assisted in this corporate wide transition.

Recall

Role: Senior Solutions/Enterprise Architect

- Produced and upheld best practices, impact analysis across the enterprise, and solutions utilizing Java, RESTful services, and Agile technologies in order to assist various teams in their development efforts. Responsibilities include the development of requirements and solutions in order to evolve the project through collaboration between all involved teams, towards to development of new web services, websites, and interactive web apps.•	Development teams were made up of team members, business users, and a PM/scrum master. Initial focus placed concentration on developing events towards the completion of a given sprint. Daily scrum meetings were used to track the projects, and provide order to the product backlog utilized in the further development of the upcoming sprints, and eventually towards the goal of completing the projects.•	Our initial go-live was completed at the end of September with the commencement of my contract.

AT&T

- Lead a team of onshore and offshore developers towards the rewriting of an entire existing project, which allows communication between the central services, and the end units (or set-top boxes) within the various regions throughout the United States. Led the architecture and design of this rewrite project. Was responsible for the delivery of various design documents, including high-level and low-level designs, technical documentation for developers to create code.•	Architecture included JBOSS stack. Central services required JAX-RS for communication between tiers. JPA was utilize to communicate with Oracle database. This architecture also required multiple message queues for communication throughout the central services.•	Project required skills in Java, Database modeling, Message Queues, and RESTful services. Existing technology stack including JBOSS Application Server, JBOSS AMQ, Camel, Oracle DB, and Hibernate

Cox Communications

Role: Senior Java Architect

- Originally hired to lead, manage, and provide new architectural changes to the Customer Order Management (COM) components for their e-commerce platform, which are centrally located services to all current and future web and non-web clients that wish to communicate and access any of the backend services provided by this team. The backend database is based on Oracle/Sterling and houses all of the order data shared across all Home Depot stores. COM is divided and lives on two different tiers: store and central grid. The central grid provides various general services needed by the individual stores. The store piece provides offline services (in case a store is disconnected from the Internet) and provides many abilities and features requested by management and users, including the ability to share order data across stores.•	Used agile practices to support our SCRUM process to ensure an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing software projects and product or application development. Our focus was on "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where our development team worked as a unit to reach a common goal".•	Leading the Distribution Center (DC) Picking/Releasing web-based application, which will allow the DC to pick, update, and release any products for orders placed in store or online via one system. •	The middle tier is written in Java and the View of this system uses FreeMarker to produce HTML for the browser. This system also utilized the COM components described above for order management and data access. All database functionality was produced using Data Access Objects (DAO).

The Home Depot

Role: Senior Architect/Project Lead

- Working as the senior architect providing leadership, estimates, staffing, managing the team, and selecting technologies for developing the NASCAR website on a new SapientNitro provided platform•	Assisted with the following tasks:o	Worked with users to understand the requirements.o	Created user personas.o	Defined use cases.o	Analyzed competitors.o	Assured that our guidelines were competed and kept up to date.o	Gathered ideas and helped with wireframing.o	Designed images, drove the prototypes and defined the UX guidelines.o	Implemented functionality and create POCs.o	Managed the usability testing process.o	Generated audit reports and discussed them with the client.o	Identified improvements.

SapientNitro

Senior Java Architect/Senior Manager

- Worked on converting an existing Java framework and architecture from Java to PHP. Original Java project was written by a team that was later released, and since the majority of their team was based on PHP expertise, they hired me to help them convert the code from Java to PHP.•	Worked on PHP/Symfony based website that provides publisher/advertiser tracking and backend management facilities. Application also utilized XML/SOAP based calls to communicate with an external vendor’s API. System was built to handle high-volume traffic, utilizing load-balancers for both the web servers and the databases. The web design consisted of JQuery based calls to the backend side in order to provide asynchronous updates and communication between the browser and the backend server. Additionally, a number of cron jobs and scripts were utilized in the Linux environment to support synchronization of data across multiple databases and environments for QA, testing, backups, and production.•	Worked on an existing system to provide new modules and upgrades for an 8 year old system. Responsible for designing several upgrades and code rewrites that involved providing a new architecture and design that utilized object oriented patterns, while still maintaining a high-volume traffic uptime of 5K users per day. The system consisted of hundreds of thousands of lines of code that we began to rewrite into smaller modules and classes using object oriented technologies and techniques. Additionally, there were any cron jobs and support scripts that were needed in order to provide the complete solution.•	Worked on a Facebook API based component to merge some functionality between an external social media privately owned website and Facebook.•	Although we were provided with Intel based machines, most of us used Ubuntu on these machines, not Windows, in order to mimic the Q/A, test, and production environment.

World Avenue

Senior PHP Developer/Java Architect

Developed and provided the website and hosting infrastructure for several companies, including:•	<a href="http://www.EliteImaging.net">www.EliteImaging.net</a> •	<a href="http://www.SolutionsInMusic.com">www.SolutionsInMusic.com</a> •	<a href="http://www.kcdbusiness.xn--com-up0a">www.kcdbusiness.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.iramichael.xn--com-up0a">www.iramichael.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.ExerciseElite.xn--com-up0a">www.ExerciseElite.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.FloridaLeak.xn--com-up0a">www.FloridaLeak.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.WorkSpaceSupply.xn--com-up0a">www.WorkSpaceSupply.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.DiscountTransmissionOrlando.com">www.DiscountTransmissionOrlando.com</a> •	<a href="http://www.DrDoug.xn--com-up0a">www.DrDoug.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.LorettaMarketingGroup.xn--com-up0a">www.LorettaMarketingGroup.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.BuildMySiteTonight.xn--com-up0a">www.BuildMySiteTonight.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.AxsysTechGroup.xn--com-up0a">www.AxsysTechGroup.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.FineRealtyInc.xn--com-up0a">www.FineRealtyInc.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.Poeministries.xn--com-up0a">www.Poeministries.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.VikkiReedWaterColors.xn--com-up0a">www.VikkiReedWaterColors.com•</a>	<a href="http://www.ChakraMandalas.comMost">www.ChakraMandalas.comMost</a> of these websites were developed using PHP, Perl, MySQL, Ajax, and Flash. Also have managed and administered the hosting, FTP, mail accounts, and web server for these websites using either CentOS Linux or Windows 2003 Server. Provided many of these companies with E-Marketing services, in order to rank them better on Google and other search engines.

Axsys Technology Group

Founder/Website Designer/PHP Developer

- Managing Lead and Senior Architect for <a href="http://www.CruisingPower.com">www.CruisingPower.com</a> website. Handled all interaction between business side and our team.•	Designed, developed, and researched all technical matters in regards to this website. Provided direction and influenced all decisions regarding technologies chosen for support and expansion of the website's architecture.•	Designs, modeling, and ideas were performed using UML, and the development process was performed using RUP•	Provided estimates for projected yearly development.•	Worked directly with Vice President to establish goals and budgets for several projects.•	Gathered team members from other teams to assist in cross-team issues. Provided these members with technical documentation and walk-through of potential projects as the members were needed.•	Worked directly with security team in diagnosing and providing solutions for possible issues such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, cross-site scripting, and code injection possibilities.•	Provided co-management of large team made up of 30+ individuals (employees, consultants, and off-shore consultants) to develop the new CruiseControl website used by cruise agents and agencies across the world.•	Strategically assigned responsibilities to various members across multiple teams.•	Participated in government mandated compliance reviews and tracking of production releases for both hardware and software. •	Participated in development of core application components for Internal Bookings, Management Facility, Royal Excursions, and Celebrity Excursions.•	Developed all processes and best practices for lifecycle development, including migrations, deployments, code branches, unit testing, and Q/A. Linux scripts were developed to provide this functionality.•	Assisted and organized project migrations to production.•	Designed, Architected, and Developed new design for shipboard based application.•	All applications were Java based on a WebSphere/Linux platform.

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.

Senior Java Consultant/Architect/Project Lead

- Reported directly to IT Director and Lead a team of 10 developers throughout the various projects. Participated in all interviews and hiring of all developers.•	Provided direction to Network Designer in order to establish appropriate physical infrastructure for the software project.•	Utilized several technologies to create a Portal site to host various Tire retailers (including Discount Tire) from a single code base. Technologies included: BEA Portal and Workshop, Tapestry, JSPs, and Servlets, EJBs, RMI, XML, Schemas, and JDBC.•	Designs, modeling, and ideas were performed using UML, and the development process was performed using RUP•	Participated and provided coding, leadership, and architecture in revamping the official Discount Tires external facing website (including the Vehicle Gallery and the Fitment Guide Web Service). Technologies included: BEA Server, SQL Server, Struts, JSPs, Servlets, Filters, EJBs. •	Designed and Wrote the Framework, which incorporates and implements several patterns including Business Delegate, Session Façade, Service Locator, and Data Access Objects. The architecture was created using a three-tier approach: Presentation, Business, and Integration Tiers•	The site supports Skins and Themes, Personalization, and also includes backend administration pages in order to modify the site without redeploying it•	Also built a Cache service hosted on a Cache Server, used to provide speedy performance and reliability for the site•	Built the cart transactions using JMS and Messaging Technologies in order to provide transaction reliability and guaranteed delivery

Discount Tire

- Provided Leadership, Guidance, and Assistance to over 40 teams in their J2EE projects. Projects included technologies like WebSphere 2.03, 3.5, 4.0., 5.0, EJBs, Servlets, JSPs, XML, XSLT, TagLibs, MQ-Series, JMS, UDB, and Mainframe connectivity. Several of these applications involved supporting thousands of users, or hundreds of page hits per minute, across multi-node environments.•	Design and implemented several J2EE design patterns including Model/View/Controller, Class Factory, Session Façade, Value Object, Presentation Bean, and Data Access Object.•	Designs, modeling, and ideas were performed using UML, and the development process was performed using RUP•	Developed a “Request For Conformance” document to describe the advantages of using Open-Source software over proprietary software. Technologies included Struts, Ant, Rosetta-Net, Cocoon, Turbine, and Velocity.•	Assisted several teams in porting their applications from internally built MVC implementations to Struts based applications.•	Provided leadership, consulting, design, and inspection of many new applications wishing to integrate several distributed technologies including Struts, J2EE, Mainframe, MQSI, and SQL based databases.•	Assisted teams in implementing and integrating security into their applications.•	Led several component and infrastructure development teams to provide analyst, design, development, testing, and documentation.•	Provided Project Management tasks including budget analysis, project management, and leadership, as well as design, coding, and other responsibilities.•	Developed and taught Courseware material to several groups of American Express employees in an effort to educate them for the purposes of Java Certification.•	Conducted Architecture Design Reviews on a weekly basis in order to assure and mandate that other teams’ projects met all American Express J2EE best practices and utilized only American Express architecture components wherever possible.

American Express

Senior Java Consultant and Architect

Before there was Struts, we created our own Enterprise Java framework, which allows us to implement the Model View Controller pattern using Java, Servlets, and JSP on the backend. On the frontend, the site was implemented using HTML and JavaScript.

Ken Ramirez