Eric Cantu Email & Phone Number

Austin, Texas Area

Houston, Texas Area

United Airlines is one of the world’s oldest airlines and a founding member of the largest airline alliance, Star Alliance. As Principal Architect IT, my responsibilities primarily rest with designing architectural changes and defining governance standards for different business groups. I have led key commercial and operational projects for the organization. One of the first projects that I worked on was implementing an IBM API Connect Design, a portal primarily built by IBM, allowing web service developers across the organization to host their APIs on a single platform. I encountered two major challenges while working on this project: sensitive company data exposure on cloud and vendor inflexibility on product customizations.I mitigated these challenges by building the company’s own secure gateway, consolidating United’s business products and business capabilities within a single, secure location. I also built new programs and consolidated previously unsupported tool features. Some of my other projects include:- NDC Design and Integration: Drove profitability and optimized service accessibility for customers by designing and integrating an XML standard NDC interface.- CI/CD Design: Improved delivery time by 200% by providing CI/CD support to common service layer DevOps team for a new DevOps platform.- Channel Security: Ensured secure corporate and vendor logins working within the same platform by developing a secure tool gateway. Key Skills: Service Oriented Architecture | Continuous Delivery | Enterprise Application Integration | Client and Vendor Management | Cloud Solutions

As Senior Manager IT - Travel, I re-engineered key business processes, optimized workflows, and developed and managed complex applications to provide a wholesome customer experience for this business unit. One of my key contributions for increasing repeat purchases was the integration of a tarmac transfer service feature in the existing application. I used a no-SQL database to increase the app’s operational uptime by 100%. This app was fed by real-time customer data, allowing the driver and agent access to customer identification, location, and destination-related information. My solution not only helped improve resource utilization but also drive value for the airline’s high-end customers including extending the service for Gold members.The other key projects that I worked on included:- No-SQL Database Deployment: Saved millions of dollars by spearheading organizational shift from relational to no-SQL databases; used MongoDB as a corporate standard.- In-Flight App Design: Enhanced customer experience by leading the development of a real-time messaging feed and a customer satisfaction scorecard.- Flight-Update Notification Service: Allayed customer dissatisfaction stemming from a sub-par flight-update notification service by resolving duplication issues; utilized strangler pattern.Key Skills: Relational and Non-Relational Databases | Mongo DB | Mobile Services | Data Cache | Complex messaging | Tibco | IBM MQ

During this role, my prime responsibility was building a REST API to support the organization’s loyalty customer profile and boost customer enrollment. My efforts increased the core service response time by 50% and accelerated the page response time by 20% for the company’s e-commerce and loyalty website. It also enabled a sophisticated customer profile, statistics, and preferences-related data displays.One of the key challenges that I faced when building REST was unavailability of .NET tools. I addressed this issue by utilizing Python as an alternative to build the first version of the loyalty REST core services, which are to-date used in the company’s loyalty platform.While spearheading United’s leap as an early adopter of the REST protocol, I also encountered team resistance to new technology integration. I resolved this issue by leading a core team to expedite REST service onboarding and usage. My team successfully managed to train developers on writing their own REST clients in the absence of supporting tools.Key Skills: Agile Development Methodologies | Event-Driven Technology | Python | JSON