James E. Pohl Email & Phone Number

New York, New York, Us

Sole integration and test engineer at the world’s largest education marketplace, supporting multiple product lines. In addition to leadership roles, continuously contributed to development tools and systems. Worked predominantly in JS with extensive development of shell scripting and Groovy for Jenkins pipelines. Defined an overall vision for building confidence during development and delivery. Designed, implemented, and promoted multiple testing frameworks.Major Accomplishments:• Implemented a load, and stress testing framework based on K6. This framework and the accompanying testing strategies were influential in verifying products could scale to ever-increasing site traffic.• Implemented a contract testing framework based on Pact. The use of this testing strategy allowed for services to remove slow, costly, and unreliable CI tests. Along with other initiatives, reduced CI execution time by 40% and increased reliability to 100%.• Created an approach for adding Canary Deploys to our delivery system with zero production downtime. Determined the best strategy for migrating from K8s deployments to ArgoRollouts. Documented, tested, and implemented this strategy for several services.• Applied multiple new testing and delivery strategies to create the first fully autonomous CI/CD pipeline. This completely removed engineer involvement with delivery, allowing PRs to go out to production as soon as they were code complete, reviewed, and passing CI. Previous deployment systems required the PR author to queue and promote their change through multiple environments taking 30 minutes to an hour of lost focus time.

New York, New York, Us

Technical lead for internal developer tools team. The team was responsible for maintaining and improving multiple developer capabilities (local development environments, integration environments, continuous integration systems, deployment systems, test tooling, and performance testing) across three development stacks (PHP, Elixir, and React/Node JS). Led team’s scrum rituals and design reviews, performed product management responsibilities, and directly contributed to capabilities development.Major Accomplishments:• Replaced development and delivery systems to support the company’s transition from a monolithic architecture to microservices. Moved from a single integration environment used for manual testing to services fully integrated into a robust CI system with on-demand integration environments for each engineer and team.• Replaced a manually scaled Jenkins system used for CI with a cloud-based, fully scalable system. As CI usage increased 3x in a single year, the system was able to accommodate the increase while continued updates improved the reliability of the system. CI reliability increased from 90% to 99% during this period.• Maintained and expanded development and delivery systems with a team of only 2 engineers, constantly changing management and priorities, and the engineering organization doubling in size.• Implemented DORA metrics collection with automatic new service discovery. Used to identify work for immediate developer experience improvements and justify further work towards CI/CD. Included CI success rate, deployment frequency, lead time, and mean time to recovery.

New York, New York, Us

A recently launched product in Beta fit a need for customers during the early days of Covid-19 lockdowns but performance at scale was unknown. Tasked with determining the current scale the product could support and working with the product team to address any bottlenecks to meet business needs. Defined the overall strategy, wrote automated tests, and executed all performance testing. Coordinated with product engineering lead and presented findings to engineering directors, VPs, and business leadership.Major Accomplishments:• Implemented a testing strategy in 48 hours that conclusively measured the performance of the website and performed analysis to determine the potential supported scale. This set a baseline for our performance at current traffic levels and forecast performance at various goals, allowing leadership to adjust plans and communication from the start.• Replaced the initial manual and costly testing strategy executed against our production system with an automated testing framework capable of providing feedback during development and in CI. This approach was easily adoptable by product engineers with no performance testing experience, multiplying our productivity. During our final test assessment, performed both methods to build confidence with engineers and product managers in the new approach. The new approach provided developer feedback much earlier in the SDLC, cost thousands of dollars less to execute, and required zero risk to production users if the system crashed.• The supported scale increased by 14,900% and exceeded the project’s target by 50%. Two years since completing this work and with continued user growth, the product has encountered no significant performance issues.

New York, New York, Us

Temporarily joined a project to launch a new product by year-end. The role focused on project management leading up to the launch and included coordination across multiple engineering and business teams. Worked with engineering teams to develop integration and test strategy for the company's first true microservices-backed product, transitioning from a monolithic architecture. In addition to running regular project meetings, also presented status updates to upper management.Major Accomplishments:• Product launched ahead of schedule, despite being extremely behind schedule when joining. Worked with each team to develop an overall project schedule with dependencies. By identifying work on the critical path, adjusted strategy, resources, and scope to meet the planned launch date.• Addressed major quality issues, restoring leadership’s confidence in the project and reducing pressure on the engineering teams. Before joining, the quality of the product was significantly below the expectations of the business, creating a rift between leadership and engineering. Interviewed both sides to identify the root cause: frequent code changes were causing regressions which were exposed during business demos. Adjusted the integration and testing strategy to allow engineers to continue with frequent deploys without introducing regressions. The use of new testing strategies and on-demand integration environments allowed changes to be verified during development and in CI.

New York, New York, Us

During the first week of employment, the entire company was mobilized to address new legislation in sales tax collection. Immediately joined cross-team leadership conversations to develop integration and test strategies for the project while still onboarding at the company. The project required massive changes across all aspects of the platform, including critical workflows such as checkout, seller payments, and accounting for the world’s largest education marketplace. Participated in architectural and workflow reviews, identifying potential issues before coding began. Coordinated integration and testing strategy across all product teams while leveraging our QA team in India. In addition to the leadership role, participated in performing manual and automated testing. Major Accomplishments:• Final integration and user testing completed two weeks ahead of schedule with all high-priority issues addressed. Full production cutover and go-live occurred at the scheduled time with limited staff and no issues.• Identified major discrepancies with a vendor and worked directly with their engineering team on solutions. Allowed sufficient time for the vendor to address the issues and for our engineering team to rework critical components and workflows to build further resilience. • Trained an under-utilized manual QA team based in India to help with manual and automated testing. Introduced the use of an isolated integration environment and Postman automation to increase development feedback loops.• Partnered with the Cloud Operations team to use a prototype integration environment they were developing. The new environment allowed for financially sensitive testing to be performed safely, isolated from production systems. This also helped shift testing to the left, as we could test changes sooner, without waiting for long production deploys.

New York, New York, Us

Full-stack SDET. Developed test and automation solutions for a web-based video production tool using JavaScript and Ruby. Embedded with product teams to provide test and automation solutions for new UX and video features. Developed unit, API, ETE, performance, and stress testing solutions as well as improvements to existing automation and CI infrastructures. Created several Ruby utility jobs to support the test team by reducing repetitive actions during exploratory testing sessions and reporting automation metrics across all test suites. Formally mentored two junior engineers while providing broad team improvements through documentation, training, and code reviews.Major Accomplishments:• Massively expanded UX and video quality automated test coverage. Increased coverage of WebDriver ETE tests by 200% and custom JavaScript video rendering tests by 60% with no increase to execution times through the addition of reliable, efficient test cases and stability improvements to test automation infrastructure.• Increased accessibility of ETE test automation on development systems. Provided solution to allow UI tests to be executable on non-production sized integration environments and developers’ local stacks, allowing full suite regressions of four different builds simultaneously by analyzing minimal needs of systems and working with TechOps to configure environments properly.

New York, New York, Us

Provided technical leadership to a seven-person product team focusing on user experience improvements to the company’s main web product. Responsible for defining and applying the team’s Scrum process as a primer for full company usage. Participated in continuous discovery activities with the team’s product manager and designer to identify opportunities.Major Accomplishment:• Significantly improved delivery times of product improvements. Frequently achieved multiple deliveries a sprint by focusing the team on the smallest possible improvements that address specific pain points of the majority of users and fostering an environment of iteration over perfection. Worked with Customer Success and UX Research teams to analyze customer data and identify the most impactful opportunities.

New York, New York, Us

Full-stack SDET. Developed test and automation solutions for a web-based video production tool using Ruby. Embedded with product teams to provide test and automation solutions for Tier 3 customer service support and third-party collaborative efforts. Developed unit, API, ETE, performance, and stress testing solutions as well as improvements to existing automation and CI infrastructures. Major Accomplishments:• Provided award-winning test support within six months of hire. Received an internal award for technical excellence during a collaborative project with a third party by ensuring the delivery of a web solution with zero JavaScript errors, a first in company history.• Greatly improved developer confidence in automated regression systems. Improved CI and nightly full suite QA/Production API regression runs near zero job success rates to near 100% success, while halving execution time. Achieved through the development of several test automation infrastructure improvements, including test asset management, asynchronous job polling, and response schema validation systems.

Boston, Ma, Us

Contracted to Medidata Solutions to upgrade and supplement existing automated tests for an ASP.NET medical coding website. Wrote SpecFlow features in Gherkin syntax from existing Ruby tests or QA demonstrations. Implemented C# step, browser, and page objects to interact with the product's website. Created Database Stored Procedures using SQL to simulate unreliable or time consuming UI actions. Developed production application monitoring NuGet package using existing test infrastructure for quick delivery to the Continuous Deployment team. Investigated and documented defects observed during testing. Provided equivalent manual steps to developers and verified defect resolution on behalf of QA. At the end of the contract, was performing lead SDET responsibilities such as program management and mentoring junior testers.Major Accomplishments:• Enabled execution of complex, isolated test scenarios on continuous delivery system. Increased capabilities of existing system by coordinating efforts and integrating solutions of multiple SDETs including a mix of UI, API, and DB automation elements.• Developed data loading procedures and automated solutions for testing and production needs. Supported load and stress testing initiatives by creating a solution to convert large amounts of test data to proprietary web service format. Authored and executed procedure for loading medical coding dictionary data to production and lower environments that exceeded the ten (10) business days SLA with a typical delivery time of one (1) business day.

Sabbatical with a study of the derivatives market to identify financial opportunities. Developed various strategies for options trades against equities, commodities, and volatility. Learned and leveraged Selenium WebDriver to obtain publicly available market data without the need for paid APIs. Created a C# application to analyze strategies and market data to determine risk, reward, and optimal target price.Major Accomplishment:• Achieved a 32% rate of return compared to the S&P 500’s -6% during the same period.

Westport, Connecticut, Us

Lead for CRM technology quality at the world's largest hedge fund. Team of company staff, onsite and offsite third-party consultants and vendors working in an agile environment with weekly sprints. Defined test approaches and environments for sprint verification, Go Live, PPV, DR, and hot fixes. Conducted complex manual testing activities at all integration points while training test engineers to execute. Collaborated with end users to develop business use cases and investigate defects.Major Accomplishments:• Delivered largest technology project in the client service group's history. Qualified the upgrade of an existing CRM system to an encrypted instance of Salesforce with integrations to Outlook, BlackBerry, legacy databases and applications.• Reduced execution time of manually executed test scenarios. Identified opportunities to reduce work effort through changing approach from component level requirements verification to complex scenario based integration testing that used automated scripts to preload environments with necessary data. Leveraged existing Salesforce features to develop a data loading approach over creation of new, custom scripts to provide immediate impact.

Bethesda, Md, Us

Led a team of four to ten testers and developers, both onsite and offsite, responsible for the full test life cycle of the backend of a real-time distributed system built with Jovial, Ada, and C/C++. Formally qualified software releases during customer deliveries and authored customer deliverable test plan, procedure, and report documents. Established processes through formal documentation, tester training programs, and mentoring. Participated in proposed software requirement change reviews and defect prevention meetings. Identified IRAD/CRAD opportunities and provided basis of estimates to management.Developed custom test automation systems to design, execute, and verify functional and performance test scenarios. Systems included Windows GUIs written in C# and Java to load and report results of real-time C++ simulators. Developed defect, change request, and employee status reporting tools with VBA for Excel and DXL for DOORS. Developed Access tracking database utilizing VBA and SQL queries for removable media, to include automated generation of identification labels, mailing and destruction notices.Major Accomplishments:• Qualified twenty-eight software releases during customer deliveries on six contracts. All deliveries were made on or ahead of schedule with no defects found during customer acceptance testing while utilizing test automation to increase test coverage by 17%.• Led development of four custom automated test systems. Systems were designed to meet specific customer needs onsite, but flexible enough to be reused for other company contracts at additional sites. Additionally, led effort to update and combine legacy tools into common test framework using C#.• Achieved multiple program success while working across two continents. Trained three replacement US testers, while supporting UK activities and meeting all US delivery milestones. Applied agile techniques to training, including pair activities and incremental learning milestones.

Bethesda, Md, Us

Test representative for a tiger team to improve UK program performance. Investigated test and integration issues into United Kingdom live mail systems with web-based customer interfaces. Performed defect causal analysis for Formal Acceptance Test failures. Developed training program framework for contractor dependent team with high turnover. Assisted the test director and test leads with Customer Test Readiness Review preparation, workforce planning, and resource scheduling. Interfaced with international customer to discuss future test strategies and restore confidence in the company. Authored and presented action plan to first and second line management to resolve remaining issues identified. Developed revised integration schedule and plan, coordinating negotiations between PM, EPM, SW, I&T, Personnel Management, and Operations.Major Accomplishment:• Authored a seventeen point performance improvement plan within the first week of assignment. Plan included causal analysis with suggested short and long-term actions. Assessment was so well received, was later requested to return to review the team’s plan for the second incremental delivery and assist with implementing the outlined improvements.

Bethesda, Md, Us

Flight test engineer as part of the customer and subcontractor integrated test team at customer site. Developed and executed integration tests for lab, ground, and air. Supported hardware and software testing of system electronics while supporting customer staff investigating software defects. Administrator and instructor for test reporting and tracking tools.

Bethesda, Md, Us

Loaned to the USPS HWAR Team to assist in meeting their program goals. Developed algorithms for high volume hand writing recognition software in C. Trained and integrated a Convolutional Neural Network into existing system to test potential performance gains. Continued to provide technical guidance to the flight planning team during this assignment.Major Accomplishments:• Provided recognition rate increase within the first two weeks of assignment.• Exceeded Full Address recognition goals by 18%.

Bethesda, Md, Us

Developed software applications for aircraft flight planning. Supported three software development programs, often concurrently. Developed two Windows GUI applications in C++ and C# to interface with customer software. Created configuration database for GUI applications, including forms to perform complex data validation. Responsible for all database and onboard binary file development. Mentored two associate engineers.Major Accomplishment:• Delivered a full featured offboard map integration system. At assignment, project was behind schedule and missing key functionality. After an architectural redesign, implementation completed ahead of schedule with additional features.

Bethesda, Md, Us

Developed a Windows GUI application in C++ for aircraft flight planning. Provided, ahead of schedule, a unique communications planning solution utilizing previously unused controls. Consistently mitigated schedule slip by taking on tasks of senior level teammates. Mentored a college intern during the summer of 2006.

Developed a web based metrics tracking tool for local facility's process repository as part of a senior project between the university and an industry partner.