Jacob Harris

Objective

I am seeking a full-time position as a Tech Lead/Manager of Software Engineering. I want to build web applications or APIs for a mission-oriented and people-centered organization. I have 27 years of software engineering experience, 16 years of senior technical leadership and 7 years of people management in engineering. I am quick to learn new technologies, and I use my experience to architect straightforward solutions to complicated problems. I firmly believe that software engineering is a team effort – I use both clear technical direction and effective communication to engage with stakeholders and lead teams. I also am an empathetic people manager, who enjoys mentoring people and guiding them as they advance in their careers.

Employment

2023 - now

Supervisory IT Specialist, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a small federal agency founded in 2010 and dedicated to financial education, regulation and enforcement in service of the American public. Since its founding, the CFPB has had an innovative digital presence, including the first design system and open-source presence in the US government, and it influenced the tactics and mission of the US Digital Service and 18F.

• Application Development Lead in Design & Development The Design & Development (D&D) team within CFPB handles a variety of print and digital design, as well as software development responsibilities. As part of the Front Office leadership team, I balance a variety of supervisory managerial duties within the department. I also partially oversee the technical work for multiple front-end and back-end web developers, guide decision-making, steer teams through bureaucratic roadblocks and establish engineering practices for an experienced and stable division focused on sustainability and longevity.
• Supervisory IT Specialist I am the first-line supervisor for 12 software engineers distributed in a matrix model across 5 different software engineering teams. These teams work on the CFPB website, consumer-facing tools, internal enforcement products and consumer complaints. As their supervisor, I conduct regular 1-1s with all my direct reports, coach them through problems and assess their performance against agency expectations twice a year. I take particular pride in having re-established regular engineering syncs as well as sending staff to conferences and other training opportunities. I also have identified several engineering best practices as guidelines for all the teams to follow.
• Contracting Officer Representative (Level 1) I am certified as a COR Level 1 in the federal government and have overseen the the procurement, payment and even the wind-down of several Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products used by developers within Design & Development. In my role as COR, I have also helped to roll out Single-Sign-On (SSO) support for multiple applications as well as set up necessary configuration.

2018 - 2023

Senior Engineering Lead / Engineering Manager, Nava PBC

Nava is a public benefit corporation that contracts with federal and state government agencies to build solutions and thoughtfully apply technology to serve the American public.

• Medicare Replicated Data Access (RDA) API The Medicare Payment Systems Modernization (MPSM) is an ambitious long-term effort spanning multiple teams to migrate Medicare payments processing away from COBOL running on mainframes to modern Java running in the AWS Cloud. I was the Engineering Lead (a key personnel role) of the Replicated Data Access (RDA) API team, which is building a streaming API in gRPC to provide claims in near real-time to other projects within CMS. While acting as the engineering lead, I also helped guide the expansion of the RDA API contract to include a greater role in the MPSM project that is providing claims data to the RDA API, as well as a pilot project to build a prototype API for receiving questionnaires in the FHIR format.
• CMS Cloud IT Operations (CLOUDITOPS) The CMS Cloud ITOPS project is an extensive effort to modernize the infrastructure powering hundreds of applications at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and migrate them to the AWS and Microsoft Azure clouds. As a developer on the Apps team, I helped to identify and implement ways to operationalize some custom tooling needed for security and compliance. I also helped build out new tooling in Go. As a member of the CMS Cloud frontend team, I have worked to standardize and improve backend infrastructure with terraform. I also was a people manager for 6 engineers.
• Quality Payments Program (QPP) Submissions API The QPP program in Medicare replaces the old flat fee-for-service model of Medicare with adjusted reimbursements that award effective doctors and penalize bad outcomes to improve the quality of Medicare through financial incentives. Nava built the QPP Submissions API to accept annual submissions of measures by participating health registries. I joined the team while the API was already in service, but I helped to implement the initial version of the final scoring algorithm and helped with a later effort to improve the scoring process for future years. I then moved into the role of Senior Tech Lead (key personnel) for the project, managing a team of up to 9 engineers and helping to define and prioritize tasks for further improvments to the API and other projects. I also help coordinate our work with other contractors working on the QPP project. I helped gracefully wind down and hand off the project when Nava’s involvement ended.
• Business Development Work I participated on different teams bidding on projects to expand Nava’s reach into new areas, several of which Nava won. On these projects, I worked closely with internal experts from various teams on such tasks as scoping out the architectures of the current system and our proposed approaches, staffing and cost estimates, QASPs and other measures of success and planning out rough timelines for delivery and milestones for the project.
• Engineering Management I have been an Engineering Manager at Nava since the fall of 2018. During that time, I typically managed teams of 6-8 engineers and coached their career development through weekly 1:1s and regular performance checkins. I am most proud about guiding junior engineers through promotions and increasing responsibilities and encouraging other direct reports to explore people management as well. I have received high marks from my direct reports in 360 Reviews, with specific recognition for building supportive teams and addressing problems quickly for my engineers to be productive.

2015 - 2018

Innovation Specialist, 18F

18F was a “government startup” that operates within the General Services Administration and consults to build software products for other federal agencies as clients. We built all of our projects in public, as open source software informed by user research and agile planning.

• MyUSA I joined this project while it was in progress and helped build out the user interface. MyUSA was a prototype web application for single-sign-on that allowed users to sign in and control what information they share with various government websites.
• Micro-purchase “The premise of the micro-purchase experiment was radical: government employees should be able to commission custom software development with the same ease as they can buy office supplies. The initial experiment was built in Google Docs; I helped create a robust web application in Ruby on Rails to successfully run all other auctions.”
• FBI Crime Data Explorer I am extremely interested in Open Data; when I learned that 18F would be building a new web application interface for crime data from the FBI, I asked to be part of the project, especially since it meant improving my Python skills. I worked closely with another developer to build and optimize an API used by the visual explorer website. I also created data loading queries to build new crosstab analyses of crime data.
• Confidential Survey As part of my involvement with the Diversity Guild to potentially gather statistics on 18F’s efforts for staffing to more closely reflect the American public, I built a prototype for conducting surveys without collecting detailed records that could compromise a user’s privacy

2006 - 2015

Senior Software Architect, The New York Times

In 2007, I was a co-founder of the Interactive Newsroom Technologies Team, a startup-like group embedded within the newsroom that creates news-driven web applications on agile timeframes. These are some of the more notable projects:

• Elections (2008-2014) In 2008, I paired with another developer to build a new and better election results loader for the general election. We continued using it for primaries and general elections in 2010, 2012, the 2013 NYC Mayoral election and 2014 election years. I refactored that loader into a modular API-based service that shared results with the web and print and operated under insane amounts of traffic.
• Olympics Results (2010/2012) The International Olympic Committee provides a real-time feed of XML results data, and I helped architect and build out a service to parse those results and display on the sites of the Times and a few partners. I also helped to architect the successor system built for the 2012 London Olympics.
• Wikileaks War Logs When Wikileaks provided the Times with leaked military dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan, I built an internal web application used by reporters to search and analyze the people and places within. I also contributed research and pitched a graphic to accompany a story on the deaths in Baghdad.
• PUFFY I helped create a new site for readers to upload photos from the 2009 inauguration of President Obama. This became the basis of a general-purpose tool named PUFFY (for Photo Upload Form For You) that allowed editors to moderate reader-submitted photos in 30+ projects. This included Moment in Time, where more than 10,000 readers submitted geotagged photos taken at the same time.
• Open Source As part of NYT Digital, I spearheaded new open-source initiatives at the NYT and improved outreach for people to use public APIs from the New York Times. I also helped to create the open.blogs.nytimes.com site for engineers to blog about their work at the Times.
• @nytimes Twitter Account One afternoon in 2007, I created the @nytimes twitter account. I then added other accounts and built the service for feeding stories from various RSS feeds into the 80+ accounts belonging to the Times.
• Times Haiku After the 2012 election, I built a bot that scanned Times articles to find haiku embedded within them.

1998 - 2006

Software Developer, Alacra, Inc.

Alacra resells financial content from over 80 different databases to financial and legal firms. My role there was R&D and rapid development, particularly combining content from these databases. I also built a custom web crawler, XML parser and services framework using XML and XSLT.

Education

1993 - 1997

B.S., Computer Science (Minor: Literature), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Concentration of studies: operating systems, software engineering, programming languages and compilers.

1997 - 1998

M.Eng., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Thesis: Lightweight Object-Oriented Shared Variables for Distributed Applications on the Internet