Jacob Harris

Objective

I am seeking a full-time position as a Tech Lead/Manager of Software Engineering. With 27 years of software engineering experience – 16 years of those in senior technical leadership and 7 in engineering management – I excel at creating web applications, APIs or other backend services right-sized for the problem and the organization. I have extensive experience with multiple programming languages, and I am quick to learn new skills on a project and leverage my software architecture skills to design straightforward solutions. I have over a decade of experience in agile software development. Building software is a team effort and I boost team velocity through clear technical direction and effective communication with stakeholders. 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 (2023 - now)

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a small federal agency founded in 2010 and dedicated to financial education, regulation and enforcement. It was the first civic technology team anywhere.

• 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 am responsible for supervisory managerial duties within the department while over partially overseeing the technical work for multiple front-end and back-end web developers. In this capacity, I guide decision-making, steer teams through bureaucratic roadblocks and establish core practices for the entire engineering team.
• 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.
• 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 (2018 - 2023)

Nava is a public benefit corporation that contracts with both 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 built a GRPC API to cheaply stream millions of claims in near real-time to other teams within CMS. I also helped guide the expansion of the RDA API contracti itself to increase Nava’s responsibility for claims streaming, as well as a pilot project to receive data in the FHIR format.
• CMS Cloud IT Operations (CLOUDITOPS) The CMS Cloud ITOPS project modernized the infrastructure to migrate hundreds of applications at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) 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 built new tooling in Go to address gaps in existing technology, and I implemented infrastructure as code (IaC) in Terraform. I also served as a people manager for 6 engineers.
• Quality Payments Program (QPP) Submissions API The QPP program in Medicare updates the flat fee-for-service model of Medicare to use adjusted reimbursements that reward effective doctors who improve the quality of Medicare. Nava built the QPP Submissions API in Express and Node.js to accept annual submissions of measures by participating health registries. I joined this team while the API was already in service, but I designed the initial version of the final scoring algorithm and helped with a larger effort to improve the scoring process for future years. After several months on the team, I then moved into the role of Senior Tech Lead (key personnel) for the project, managing a team of up to 9 engineers following agile practices and coordinating our work with other contractors working on the 14 teams implementing the QPP project. When Nava’s involvement ended on this contract, I helped gracefully wind down and hand off the work to our successors.
• Business Development Work I participated on multiple teams crafting bids and implementing technical challenges to expand Nava’s reach into new areas. On these projects, I worked closely with my colleagues to research architectures of current systems and define our proposed approach to the problems. This included architecture digagrams, staffing and cost estimates, QASPs and other measures of success as well as our proposed timelines and milestones.
• Engineering Management I began as an Engineering Manager at Nava in the fall of 2018. For most of my time at Nava, 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 multiple junior engineers to increase their skills and responsibilities and earn promotions into senior engineers. I consistently received accolades about my management approach 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 (2015 - 2018)

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 upon starting at 18F and helped build out the backend and user interface. A precursor to login.gov, MyUSA was a prototype web application for the public to use single-sign-on to and control what information they shared 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 requested to be part of that roject, especially since it would allow me to learn Python too. I worked closely with another senior 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 that took advantage of the new NIBRS reporting data.
• Confidential Survey As part of my involvement with the Diversity Guild, I built a prototype for conducting surveys without collecting individual records that could compromise a user’s privacy.

2006 - 2015

Senior Software Architect, The New York Times (2006 - 2015)

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. Some of the more notable projects that I worked on are listed below.

• 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 both primaries and general elections from 2008 to 2014, as well as for the NYC mayoral election in 2013. Duing this time, 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) To improve how the Times presented Olympics results, in 2010 I helped architect and build a backend service that could parse a firehose of XML data provided by the International Olympic Committee to populate pages, visualizations and interactive widgets for both the web and print. 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 about a surge of sectarian violence in Baghdad after the US invasion.
• PUFFY In 2009, we created a site for readers to upload and share their photos from the 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. For one of these named “A Moment in Time,” more than 10,000 readers submitted geotagged photos taken at the same time across the Earth.
• Open Source As a senior software architect in 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 to explore automated news feeds. I built a custom posting bot and admin interface 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. This became a Tumblr blog of curated haiku that ran from 2013 to 2017, posting thousands of found haiku.

1998 - 2006

Software Developer, Alacra, Inc. (1998 - 2006)

Alacra resells financial content from over 80 different databases to financial and legal firms. My role there was R&D and rapid development, particularly in projects that combined content from multiple 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 (1993 - 1997)

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

1997 - 1998

M.Eng., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1997 - 1998)

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