Hire Me

Joshua Oliphant

Joshua Oliphant | 360.333.0114 | joshua.oliphant@hey.com | https://linkedin.com/in/joshuaoliphant

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

ServiceNow

Role: Senior Systems Engineer

Location: Olympia, WA

Dates: July 2024 - Current

Key contributions

  • Updated monitoring of legacy Kafka system.

Nortal - consulting at T-Mobile

Role: Senior Software Development Engineer (SDE4)

Location: Olympia, WA

Dates: January 2022 – April 2024

Key contributions:

  • Led Docker containerization of Java/Spring Boot microservices, which improved application scalability and efficiency by decreasing image size by nearly 50% with Java 9 modules.

  • I created an automation command-line project with Python and the Click library, which streamlined many processes, including production releases and rollbacks.

  • Streamlined application deployments using GitLab CI/CD pipelines and Helm for Kubernetes services, which automated reliable builds, tests, and packages and gave rapid developer feedback.

  • Researched and spearheaded the creation of a Kafka cluster in Kubernetes with open-source Strimzi, enabling fast and asynchronous event-driven microservices and dramatically reducing costs compared to the Confluent Platform.

Technical stack:

  • Back-end: Microservices, Java 17, Spring, Python automation

  • Platform: Kubernetes in datacenter

  • Databases: Postgres, H2

  • Virtualization: Docker

  • Testing: Junit, Gatling

  • Monitoring: Splunk, Grafana

  • Others: Maven, Jira, Splunk, Git, Tilt, Helm, Kafka, REST, event-driven architecture

Nortal - consulting at Motorola

Role: Senior Software Development Engineer (SDE3)

Location: Olympia, WA

Dates: February 2021 – December 2021

Key contributions:

  • Developed Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines to automate the deployment of Dotnet services to FedRamp environments.

  • Focused on high-quality C#/.Net microservices development.

Technical stack:

  • Back-end: C#, .Net

  • Cloud: Azure

  • Virtualization: Docker

  • Testing: MSTest

  • Others: Git, Jira, REST

Nortal - consulting at Amazon

Role: Senior Software Development Engineer (SDE3)

Location: Olympia, WA

Dates: September 2020 – January 2021

Key contributions:

  • I led a team that integrated AWS services (Lambda, Kinesis, DynamoDB, S3, Glue) into an ETL data pipeline. This made the cleaned-up and transformed code available to key downstream services.

  • Authored Java AWS Lambdas for data processing within Step Functions, ensuring that each data processing step was reliably executed.

  • Used IaC (Infrastructure as Code) with the AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) in Typescript to create safe repeatable infrastructure.

Technical stack:

  • Back-end: Java, AWS Lambdas

  • Cloud: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

  • Databases: DynamoDB

  • Virtualization: None (Lambdas)

  • Testing: Junit

  • Monitoring: Cloudwatch

  • Others: Git, Kinesis, Glue, Step Function, Lamda, IaC (CDK), ETL

Nortal - consulting at Brightloom (startup)

Role: Senior Software Development Engineer (SDE3)

Location: Olympia, WA

Dates: February 2020 – September 2020

Key contributions:

  • Built backend microservices with Python and Django with a consistent structure so that each subsequent service could be built quickly, increasing developer productivity.

  • Built CI/CD pipelines with TravisCI to deploy Python services to Kubernetes with Helm, which delivered reliable applications with a fast developer feedback loop.

  • Contributed to Terraform IaC (Infrastructure as Code), creating reliable and repeatable infrastructure creation.

Technical stack:

  • Back-end: Django, Microservices, REST

  • Platform: Kubernetes

  • Databases: Postgres

  • Virtualization: Docker

  • Monitoring: Datadog

  • Testing: unittest

  • Others: Terraform, Helm

Nortal - consulting at Expedia

Role: Senior Software Development Engineer (SDE3)

Location: Olympia, WA

Dates: August 2019 – January 2020

Key contributions:

  • Independently executed and designed a data pipeline, demonstrating complete ownership of work. This enabled Expedia to make data-driven decisions in downstream services.

  • Constructed Java microservices and updated an existing Lua service, each a key component of the data transformation pipeline.

  • Integrated Kafka for continuous data transformation and deployed solutions on AWS ECS, showcasing cloud expertise.

Technical stack:

  • Back-end: Java, Spring, Microservices, event-driven, Lua

  • Cloud: AWS

  • Virtualization: Docker

  • Testing: JUnit

  • Monitoring: Datadog

  • Others: Git, Kafka, ECS, CI/CD

Nordstrom

Role: Software Engineer 2 for Kubernetes Platform Team

Location: Seattle, WA

Dates: August 2018 – August 2019

Key contributions:

  • Led Kubernetes Customer Engineering Initiative which included onboarding new teams, held office hours and one-on-ones to provide guidance on Kubernetes best practices. This provided a consistent “public” face for the team, and increased my teams’ overall productivity, as well as improving the Kubernetes developer experience across Nordstrom.

  • Managed large-scale Kubernetes clusters (50+ nodes) for critical workloads.

  • Provided on-call support, ensuring system stability and performance.

  • Contributed to automation in Python, bash, and make.

  • Participated in monthly disaster recovery exercises, ensure the smooth recovery to multiple levels of disasters, from service to namespace to full cluster recovery.

Technical stack:

  • Back-end: Golang, Python, bash, makefiles

  • Cloud: AWS

  • Platform: Kubernetes

  • Virtualization: Docker

  • Testing: go test

  • Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog

  • Others:Bazel, Gitlab, Gitlab CI, Gitlab issue tracking, Helm, Prometheus, Datadog, S3, Terraform

Nordstrom

Role: Software Engineer 1- 2 for POS Modernization Team

Location: Seattle, WA

Dates: August 2015 – August 2018

Key contributions:

  • Played a key role in the Point-of-Sale system's transition from a monolith to a microservices architecture.

  • Became an Apache Kafka SME, deepening expertise in event-driven architecture that enabled me to deliver real-time data transformations.

  • Containerized services for deployment to Kubernetes.

Technical stack:

  • Back-end: Java, Spring

  • Cloud: AWS

  • Platform: Kubernetes

  • Virtualization: Docker

  • Testing: Junit, Cucumber

  • Monitoring: Datadog, Splunk

  • Others: Maven, Gitlab, Jira, Confluence, Splunk, Datadog, Kafka

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Backend:Java, Spring Boot, Python, Django, Flask, C#, Dotnet, .Net, REST, event-driven, streaming, Lua
Cloud:AWS lambda, glue, step function, ECS, S3
Data storage and databases:Postgres, sqlite, Kafka, Kinesis, DynamoDB
Testing:Junit, Cucumber, Gatling, Test Containers, go test, unittest, pytest, MSTest
AI:Github Copilot, ChatGPT, OpenAI API, Anthropic API, Python SDKs
Monitoring:Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, Cloudwatch
Others:Docker, Helm, Git, Splunk, Prometheus, Datadog, Jira, Gitlab CI, CI/CD, DevOps, Bazel, make, bash, Tilt

EDUCATION

Seattle University - Seattle, WA

  • Bachelor of Science, Computer Science - September 2014 – June 2016

Seattle Central - Seattle, WA

  • Associate degree - September 2012 – June 2014

RECENT AI SIDE PROJECTS

  • AI Chat website

    • Python and Flask on the backend

    • htmx and Tailwind on the frontend

    • Uses the OpenAI Assistant API to power that chat functionality

  • PDF Benchmarker

    • Part of the first cohort of DeepLearning.ai students to build open-source projects that utilize learned skills.

    • The current project is a PDF benchmarker to understand the best PDF scraping tools for RAG applications

    • Built a Python command line application with Click that has a plugin system for adding new PDF scrapers

    • Used Microsoft Research’s AutoGen library to create a team of AI agents to solve various parts of the task.

    • Streamlit to visualize output data.