Matt Spera Email & Phone Number

New York, Us

New York, Us

New York, Us

Gave engineering management a whirl. I learned a lot managing 5 direct reports, but I also missed solving technical problems and designing software architectures.

New York, Us

Austin, Texas, Us

Austin, Texas, Us

Formerly Spredfast + Lithium. Refactored the entire database connection layer for Lithium’s core community product in preparation for it’s impending deployment into AWS, replacing a 12-year-old library with a more modern one, exposing pool metrics, and resolving multiple issues with unreleased database resources. Separated multiple concerns into discrete, testable classes and earned kudos for seamlessly handling RDS failover scenarios.Researched the usage of Redis with respect to migration, and rewrote several calls in order to boost content migration performance, achieving a 75% decrease in overall time needed to hydrate the Redis cache. Designed, developed, and tested various features on Lithium’s current community product offering, including features to facilitate migration to Lithium’s platform from other communities as well as the subscription framework. This work included writing unit & functional tests for new functionality, adding test coverage where previously there had been none, and soliciting code reviews and feedback from various subject matter experts. Acted as Scrum master for a high-performing, 6-person engineering consisting of multiple disciplines (QE, Performance Testing, Software Engineering), while achieving a predictable velocity. Provided knowledge, guidance and mentoring to junior engineers working on LJX across multiple sites (Lithium’s acquisition of the Jive-x platform).

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Added support for source language detection into the Java Agent to give customers more visibility into the technologies and languages their development teams used.Added instrumentation support for new versions of third-party libraries, including the Play Framework.Assisted the Java Agent Team in adding Java 9 support to the existing Java Agent, while also deprecating Java 5 support.Helped Support troubleshoot and diagnose customer issues with the Java Agent.

Austin, Texas, Us

I lead a 4-person engineering team building out components of Jive’s next-generation architecture. We develop new microservices that connect to AWS offerings, e.g., S3, RDS, and DynamoDB, by using frameworks including Dropwizard, Guice, Hystrix, and JUnit and documenting all our public APIs using Swagger annotations. As a member of the larger Core Product Engineering organization, I help design and develop solutions to hard problems, refactor old and crufty code, and peer with other engineers to produce new features and squash bugs. I also perform detailed, root-cause analyses of customer issues to fix underlying bugs, occasionally tune expensive SQL queries, and eliminate pesky race conditions within individual web application nodes and across clusters. I'm a huge proponent of test-driven development, pull requests, and gating commits behind a set of pre-merge builds to try and identify regressions in functionality. I've recently spent a large amount of time significantly refactoring the core product’s management of HTTP connections to external dependencies, migrating from Apache’s HttpClient (an open-source library marked as EOL in 2011) to it’s actively-developed successor, HttpComponents. Additionally, I made liberal use of Hystrix to bulkhead the core product from cascading failures and audited all connection and socket timeouts to external services. For the last year and a half, I've led two different teams as a Scrum master, consistently achieving a good burndown of tasks during a sprint while maintaining an active development role and mentoring junior engineers within Engineering and Support.

Austin, Texas, Us

Beaverton, Or, Us

Led a team of nine developers architecting, implementing, and supporting an N-tier search application framework consisting of eight search indexes and three Spring-powered RESTful servlets that handle over 3 million daily requests via web, mobile devices, and iPhone applications across high-volume sites including nikestore.com, nike.com, and Nike retail stores.Refactored a mission-critical, multipurpose servlet to more efficiently multithread simultaneous queries to the underlying search indexes, which resolved a major performance bottleneck involving large numbers of hung threads while also increasing request capacity and speeding up overall response time.Served as technical lead in a team comprised of five in-house developers, a digital agency, and a search vendor during two major front-end merchandising overhauls of the online Nike store, which enhanced merchandiser control of the overall consumer experience and augmented product relevancy during keyword search and navigation, ultimately leading to increased site conversion year-over-year.Evaluated new versions of Endeca software and provided feedback, enhancement requests, and API suggestions to their product management team as the Nike technical representative on their Customer Advisory Board.Proactively introduced test-driven development, consistent build processes, and continuous integration to the search platform at Nike, leading to augmented test code coverage across all search-related Java artifacts, a standardized set of Maven and Ant buildscripts, and the automation of builds, culminating in repeatable deployment steps across environments that significantly reduced deployment-related downtime.Fostered open communication with category producers, technical producers, and other internal business partners to determine future business needs and requirements, tune online search strategies, and ascertain pain points to streamline tools and processes.

Austin, Tx, Us

Completely revamped a legacy data-load application into an extensible, robust, and optimized process that leveraged Java 6, SQL*Loader, and the Java Spring framework in less than four weeks, netting a 75% performance gain in overall processing time.Architected, implemented, and deployed all versions of the vendor cost portal, which grew from a pilot project with an initial 40-vendor user base to a flagship application supporting 4000+ vendors and over 200 stores.Led a six-person technical team for the vendor cost portal through four major version milestones by conducting technical analyses and code reviews, assigning tasks based on developer skill sets and growth areas, and working with the business analyst and business partners to more accurately understand and plan for future needs and enhancements.Analyzed, tuned, and refactored Oracle database queries and stored procedures to streamline performance within the vendor cost portal by several orders of magnitude.Pioneered more formal software development and project management methodologies resulting in improved project schedule accuracy and delivery, a more balanced developer workload, and increased business partner satisfaction.Introduced build and deployment processes utilizing Ant which evolved into highly complex utilities managed by Hudson that facilitated automated unit testing, code coverage reporting, and nightly build generation.Drove cross-team education regarding web technologies, usability, and user interface design via collaborative brown bags for the IT department.

Houston, Texas, Us

Spearheaded the optimization of subroutines and classes comprising the enterprise-level intranet portal, attaining 500% improvements in content delivery times, eliminating performance bottlenecks and increasing worldwide employee satisfaction.Architected and implemented enhancements to e-commerce web applications generating over $15M per year.Increased web sales by 50% in 3 months by building a customer quote system into the online store, reducing sales rep quote generation time by 75%.Converted and optimized the online store from ASP to Cold Fusion in less than 2.5 weeks, garnering a 90% improvement in page generation and load time.Designed and developed a custom internationalization scheme for a Cold Fusion web application, allowing 20 different countries in 8 local languages to run off a single database and copy of code. Revamped a rudimentary user interface in 3 months for the web application used to manage the customer training and education line of business.