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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• 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.

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..
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
• 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.

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.

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.
• 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..
• 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.

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.