Kurt Klein Email & Phone Number

Glendale, California, United States

• Contractor for the United States Geological Survey through Apogee.
• Developed user-facing and back-end software focused on end-to-end data pipelines, from data submission, harvesting, validation, and storage to search, retrieval, and presentation
• Slashed the run time of an application dependency from > 20 minutes to < 1 minute by optimizing the database interface and implementing multi-threading
• Contributed detailed application documentation to both repo READMEs and Jira
• Collaborated and communicated effectively on a 100% remote team covering three time zonesTechnologies: Python, FastAPI, Flask, Chalice, GraphQL, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL (queries and schema design), JavaScript, Vue.js.

Burbank, California, United States

Contractor for the United States Geological Survey through Apogee Engineering through Apex Systems. See Apogee Engineering description above for a brief summary of the work I did.

Burbank

• Created a GraphQL-based Python web applicaton back-end using FastAPI and GraphQL Core 3 to serve audio-visual metadata stored in MongoDB for a Big Six film studio archiving a petabyte-scale project
• Created an automation test framework using Pytest; wrote 300+ unit and integration tests for the API
• Built Docker images for production and development versions of the API and for MongoDB and MySQL sample data (for exploratory and integration testing)
• Created CI/CD pipelines in GitLab to run tests and build Docker images; integrated pipelines with Slack
• Wrote extensive documentation using MKDocs (Markdown) for all of the above
• Created Slack application to scrape Munki web app and summarize results for support team

Pasadena, CA

• QA lead on a small, fast-moving, project team centered around integration with Amazon Cognito with responsibilities including:
• Create test plans and define test strategies
• Write front-end UI automation and back-end API automation using Capybara and Selenium in a Python robot framework environment
• Deploy and maintain test automation in GoCD
• Write test tool code in Python used by the QA organizationAPI QA engineer with responsibilities including:
• Ensure code pushed (or removed) to the API repo from anywhere within the organization has acceptable test coverage

Pasadena

• Troubleshoot customer-facing issues using:
• MySQL / MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Vertica, and Apache Hive queries and analysis for ad delivery and targeting issues
• Chrome / Firefox developer tools for JavaScript and HTML debugging of live pages
• Charles Proxy for modifying HTTP headers and bodies and locally-mapping resources
• Sumo Logic, Grafana, and Metamarkets for performance analysis and internal systems monitoring
• Ad hoc test cases to reproduce reported product behaviors to determine root-causes, identify work-arounds and solutions, and provide details to Engineering for escalationsSkills and experience

• Managed department budget and spending; devised a new method to predict future expenditures
• Evaluated testing data to decide department priorities
• Led safety and other training meetings
• Designed, wrote, tested, and implemented new labs to raise standards to college-prep level

• Taught AP Biology, AP Chemistry, AP Environmental science and other physical and biological sciences courses.
• Teacher of the Year (out of ~60 teachers) for developing advanced science courses, incorporating technology, engaging and caring for students, and facilitating staff discussions and staff improvement
• Improved AP exam passing rate by ~100%
• Dedicated to professional growth through college courses, AP summer institutes, dozens of seminars, and conferences