Carlos Rafael Ramirez

Senior Software Developer

Barcelona, crramirez@gmail.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlos-rafael-ramirez/
https://github.com/crramirez
https://crramirez.github.io/My-Resume
https://stackoverflow.com/users/2210035
https://twitter.com/crramirezc

PROFILE

I’m a Senior Software Developer with 24+ years of professional experience, specializing in enhancing performance, reliability, and scalability for complex systems. My expertise includes Java, AWS, and data engineering, with a passion for transforming legacy systems and optimizing large-scale infrastructure.

WORK EXPERIENCE

Senior Software Engineer, Scopely, Jul 2024 - Present

Data Infrastructure & Cloud Systems

Maintain and optimize data infrastructure for large-scale analysis, working with Java-based microservices to process and pipeline extensive datasets to BigQuery.
Manage AWS components (SQS, Kinesis, DynamoDB) to ensure reliability and scalability, enhancing data flow and performance for complex data workflows.

Tech Stack Java, AWS (SQS, Kinesis, DynamoDB), BigQuery, Data Engineering, Microservices Architecture

Senior Java Developer, King, Sep 2022 - May 2024

Part of a team that develops software that allows data scientists to perform customer segmentation and A/B Testing, which represents 40% of the company’s income. Highlights:

Improved the random algorithm used in A/B Testing to use Farm Fingerprint, improving the performance in BigQuery by over 60%
Rewrote on Java and incorporated an old salt generation system written in Python to help our users have better A/B Test samples, reducing what is called pre-test imbalance.

Tech Stack: Java, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes, Docker, MySQL, TDD, JSON-RPC, Google BigQuery, Git, Linux, Jenkins, Object Oriented Design, Agile Methodologies, WSL, Software Development, Unit Testing, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Software Engineering, Bash

Senior Software Engineer, Bridgestone Mobility Solutions, May 2019 - Aug 2022

Took the lead in taking over an acquired legacy system, upgrading its technology stack, improving its security, training new people from customer support, and saving about € 3,000 in server rental monthly costs.
Successfully took a protagonist role in recovering and putting the legacy system again after a data center burn episode, with no data loss and only a few days of downtime.
Took the lead in migrating customers to our platform, prioritizing the customer and minimizing the team’s time consumed, reaching an unbelievable 90% of the whole fleet.

Tech Stack: Spring Boot, Java EE / JPA, JBoss AS / Wildfly, Hibernate, Spring Data / MVC, Gradle, Git, Jenkins, Oracle Database, MySQL, Linux, Xamarin, React Native, Appium.

Master Software Specialist, Smartmatic Panama S.A., Ago 2017 – Apr 2019

Smartmatic is a multinational company specializing in technology solutions for governments, producing electronic voting systems, intelligent city solutions (including public safety and public transportation), identity management systems for civil registration, and authentication for government applications.

Migrated our solutions from Oracle JDK Hotspot to OpenJDK OpenJ9, saving at least $10K in licensing costs, reducing our cloud resource requirements by half, and saving us at least 30% in cloud computing costs.
Adapted our systems to manage their private keys and signing processes through a CloudHSM from AWS, allowing us to reach more markets complying with regulatory restrictions.
Single-handed integrated the company’s user authentication system based on Java EE with the central governmental authentication system (like OAuth), delivering a reliable solution.
Success case cutting more than $20K in project costs by developing a form recognition in OpenCV and Java to extract votes from scanned vote tallies, allowing more than 400 operators to transcribe thousands of votes from about 80K tallies.
Created a web application in Spring Boot to manage cloud stacks using terraform scripts, reducing the time required to deploy a test environment by more than half.
Managed the installation of a private cloud using OpenStack with the already own resources maximizing its shared use, saving the company more than $5K per month in cloud services.
In charge of elaborating, finding the budget and implementing a fixed annual training plan for all team members, managing training and certification for 30 team members in front-end, back-end, database, security, among others, increasing their productivity by at least 20%.

Tech Stack: OpenCV, Java EE / JAX-RS / JPA, JBoss AS / Wildfly, Hibernate, Spring Data / MVC, Liquibase, AngularJS, Maven, Git, Jenkins, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL, Docker, Linux, Virtualization, Cloud computing, Terraform.

Engineering Associate Manager, Smartmatic Panama S.A., Nov - 2012 - Jul 2017

Led a team of 7 to develop the adaptation of our voter authentication system to the Armenian Government law and business rules, used to configure more than 2K voter authentication machines and classify the biometric data from about 5M voters.
Created and optimized the Pentaho Kettle’s template for importing, in <1 hour, the biographic and biometric data of 5M voters from a remote PostgreSQL database to Oracle, allowing voter authentication machines to be programmed and distributed in less than 5 days.
Led a team of 5 in implementing and stress testing a mission-critical web service in Java EE with JMS, receiving, storing, and routing 270K transmission packages from voting machines in no more than 60 minutes.
Restructured a team of 9 to be the first one to fully implement Scrum achieving 50% more productivity, 90% releases on time, and more than 30% fewer defects found.
Managed a team of 12 in upgrading the Election Management System for the new voting machines, including the development of the new Ballot Design, used to generate 1.7K different ballot faces and serialize 80M of ballots in PDF for 55M registered voters and 92K voting machines.
Automated the installation of the Election Management System inside a Docker container, reducing up to 80% the setup time and lowering in at least 30% the people needed to do the deployment on the customer’s data center.
Led the installation and use of a Continuous Integration platform (Jenkins), the migration of our build system from Ant to Maven, and installation of Sonar as a code review platform, improving the daily releases to QA, the automated testing, and code review.

Tech Stack: Java EE / JAX-RS / JPA, JBoss AS / Wildfly, Hibernate, Liquibase, AngularJS, Maven, Git, Jenkins, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL, Docker, Linux, Virtualization, Cloud computing, Kettle.

Smartmatic Labs C.A., Product Architect, Mar 2010 - Oct 2012

Made scriptable all the pipeline of building a custom operating system for our standalone solutions, using FAI (Fully Automated Installation). It avoided the rework and made a completely auditable OS image, reducing the costs for solution certification.
Led team of 6 to polish and optimize our distributed Electoral Solution used in the Philippines 2010. It reduced by half the number of technicians needed to be in the field solving technical issues.

Tech Stack: FAI, Linux, JBPM, JBoss, Java EE, Hibernate, JMS

Smartmatic Labs C.A., Software Lead, May 2008 - Mar 2010

Designed and led the development with a team of 5 of our call center election day solutions. It gives support through more than 900 operators to more than 5K voting centers. For the ticket workflow, we used JBPM.

Tech Stack: Java EE, JBoss, GWT, Oracle Database, Hibernate, Hibernate Search, JBPM, Liquibase

Smartmatic Labs C.A., Software Engineer, Mar 2004 - May 2008

Part of a team of 8 which developed the Electoral Management System in Java EE used in many elections with at least 30K voting machines and 11M voters.

Tech Stack: Java EE, JBoss, Oracle Database, Hibernate, JMS

OTHER EXPERIENCE

Maintainer of Pengwin a Linux distro optimized for WSL based on Debian, also maintain a remix of Fedora for WSL. Tech Stack: bash, Visual Studio, Linux, WSL.
Collaborate with the project JOVR, which is binding between Core Java and Oculus Runtime, adapting it from de Oculus prerelease version to the consumer one. Tech Stack: Java, JNA, JNI and C.
Founded a startup to introduce people to virtual worlds, using Open Wonderland in AWS instances, packed the viewer made in Java to Windows Store, and ported it to Oculus Rift. Also, I built its e-commerce website https://cyramix.com using Drupal. Tech Stack: Java, OpenGL, C, PHP, Swing, Docker, AWS (EC2, Cloud Front, Route 53)
Active stack overflow user with 7.3K combined reputation in answers being the top 5% in docker tag.
Solved a bug in Wine using unit testing, and my patch was accepted (which is very difficult). Tech Stack: C Programming Language
Shared a skeleton to bring Java applications to Windows Store using Project Centennial on Github.
Dockerized Lime Survey made public, and it is the first result in Google with more than 100K downloads.
I have made many contributions in GitHub to projects from JetBrains, Oracle, and Microsoft. Tech Stack: Java, bash and C++
Spanish native, English professional level (IELTS 6, B2), French intermediate (DELF B1)

EDUCATION

Sun Certified Mobile Application Developer, Feb 2004
Sun Certified Web Component Developer, July 2003
Sun Certified Java Programmer, May 2002
Bachelor of Systems Engineer (Ingenieria de Sistemas): Computer Science, Oct 1993 – Aug 1999 Universidad Metropolitana, Caracas, Venezuela