Craig MacKay
Senior Full Stack Engineer/Architect
About
Seasoned professional with over 25 years of experience in software design and development, specializing in web and mobile applications. Possess a comprehensive skill set and a proven track record in delivering cutting-edge software solutions.
Work Experience
American Family Insurance
A leading provider of insurance, offering diverse coverage and services, focused on customer-centric solutions for individuals and businesses.
August 2022 – Present
Lead Enterprise Architect
I made significant contributions to the development of quoting and policy management platforms within the small business commercial insurance division. These platforms were designed as white-label solutions for American Family Insurance and notable partners including Homesite, Main Street America, Bold Penguin, Progressive, Geico, and others. They were utilized by both end users and agents to streamline operations.
Highlights
- As part of a two-person team, in collaboration with a digital product manager, I led a high-priority initiative to assess a partner system for performance improvements. Conducted comprehensive performance profiling of partner systems and creating essential tools and reports to communicate our findings effectively. These findings were instrumental in prioritizing efforts to decrease quote response times.
- Worked on the core platform team to identify and address areas for error rate improvement. During this collaboration, I successfully identified and rectified a critical bug in the front-end software, reducing the error rate from 13% to less than 1%. These improvement significantly enhanced the quality of our service and generated substantial cost savings of $700,000 per month for one of our prominent partners.
- Built POCs and architectural designs for new project initiatives, including a requoting platform built using a serverless architecture on AWS (Step Functions, Lambda, CDK).
- Cooridinated with our UX team to determine best practices for better integration between the UX and development teams.
- Integrated security scanning in the platform for SAST, DAST, and secrets
- Patched legacy systems for security compliance
- Provided guidance to leadership and staff, offering insights into best practices concerning our development systems and processes
Jack Henry & Associates
Remote
A tech leader in financial solutions (6700 employees) Jack Henry acquired Geezeo in July 2019
July 2019 – August 2022
Software Engineering Senior Manager
Managed the Front-End Engineering and Product Management teams for the Geezeo division within Jack Henry & Associates.
Highlights
- Built a team consisting of a Senior Product Manager, two Senior Front End Engineers, and a QA Engineer.
- Delivered features for the PFM product I had architected and developed for Geezeo over the past four years. The product provides Spending Analysis, Budgeting, Financial Goal Management, Networth Tracking, Account Aggregation, Financial Alerts, Transaction Search, and many other features, and over 500 financial institutions using it. The product could be integrated as a stand-alone web application or embeddable widgets using a Javascript API.
- Developed a proof of concept voice PFM prototype using Amazon Alexa SDK
- Technologies utilized include React, D3, Mobx, Material-UI
Geezeo
Seattle, Washington, United States
Provider of white-label PFM solutions for banks, delivering extensive financial features and adaptable products for institutions.
March 2015 – July 2019
Front End Architect
Designed and Developed features for the Geezeo white-label Personal Financial Management (PFM) product (~100 employees).
- Architected the new version of our white-label PFM Product
- Designed and Developed features for our white-label business financial management product TruBiz using Angular.
Technologies utilized include React, D3, Mobx, Material-UI, Angular
Twin Technologies, Inc.
A tech consultancy offering bespoke solutions across industries, known for tailored client-focused technology services.
March 2014 – January 2015
Senior Software Engineer
Worked for a consulting organization on the underarmor.com website
- Built out the initial architecture and features for the CMS platform used by internal employees to manage product and marketing campaigns for the Under Armour website. The system was built using the MEAN stack.
- Worked on features for the responsive redesign of the main underarmour.com B2C website. This included working on features for the main product grid page and product search filters and primarily led the work on the checkout page using Angular.
- Worked on a parallax scrolling page for the holiday gift finder feature.
Seattle, Washington, United States
May 2010 – March 2014
Independent Software Consultant
Designed and developed systems for various software companies.
- Built web applications and web services for searching pharmacy records using Apache Solr, Coffeescript, Backbone.js, RequireJS, Bootstrap, and Jersey. The application provided a rich web interface for searching and displaying patient information. The main search provided a faceted auto-complete style search.
- Developed an integration layer for using a point-of-sale terminal for capturing signatures for a web application. The system used a local Java web start application to communicate with the Point of Sale (POS) device and then provided a local websocket service that could be accessed via CORS from the web page.
- Designed the initial front-end architecture for my client’s next generation of pharmacy management software.
- Built web services for a health and fitness-related startup out of San Francisco. The API integrated an image recognition system for use via a REST API.
Medio Systems
Greater Seattle Area
A leader in mobile analytics, specializing in advanced data solutions and innovative analytics platforms.
October 2012 – May 2013
Senior Software Engineer
Worked for a small mobile analytics and advertising company. (~50 employees)
- Developed a reporting console for the existing analytics platform, including adding dashboard features using HighCharts.
- I was responsible for leading the front-end implementation of a new product initiative utilizing modern JavaScript frameworks.
Placed
Seattle, Washington, United States
A location analytics startup, specialized in trend analysis and application development, later acquired by a prominent tech firm.
February 2011 – July 2011
Senior Software Engineer
First technical hire for a VC incubated startup called Sewichi, which was later renamed Placed. Worked out of the Madrona Venture Group offices in Seattle while producing the initial version of the application. Placed provided location analytics trends and was later purchased by Foursquare.
- Responsible for the initial architecture of the platform, including multiple Android clients, web applications, and back-end web services.
- Selected and installed development tools for the team, including Subversion, Nexus, Sonar, and Jenkins.
- Set up AWS systems for both internal tools and production servers. This utilized Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk and RDS services.
- Interviewed and hired additional developers for the team.
Utilized multiple open-source technologies, including Spring Framework, Jersey, JQuery, Sammy, and Android.
OpenMarket
Seattle, Washington, United States
A mobile messaging innovator, known for billing systems, customer tools, and integration with carriers, fostering technology advancements.
April 2008 – May 2010
Senior Software Engineer
Designed and developed software for mobile messaging and billing aggregator. The company provided bulk messaging and billing. (~100 employees)
- Designed the WAP Billing product for processing financial transactions via HTTP redirects initiated from mobile web browsers. The system utilized the Jersey REST framework, Dozer, Spring, and Hibernate/JPA.
- Implemented features for the legacy payments service, including the financial transaction reconciliation processing for Verizon using Apache Camel and Spring.
- Redesigned from the ground up the customer billing system responsible for processing fees from all of OpenMarket's mobile transactions and messaging traffic. Messaging traffic alone measured 350 million messages a month. Billing rules calculated fees based on multiple message attributes. The new system provided a significant improvement in both performance and accuracy. Monthly billing processing time went from 14 hours to 20 minutes. This system utilized Jersey, Spring, Hibernate/JPA, and Groovy.
- Designed the initial architecture for the new Payments processing service using Jersey, Dozer, Spring, and Hibernate/JPA. The system provided a flexible architecture to support integration with carrier payment systems.
- Designed the framework for delivering new administrative and customer-facing web-based tools using GWT. Helped in growing the team from 1 to 5 developers. This project utilized GWT, Gin/Guice, Spring, Hibernate/JPA, Dozer, Jersey, Apache JackRabbit, and JasperReports. The web tools are integrated with two databases and over six web services.
- Introduced new technologies to the development group, including GWT, Jersey, Dozer, Groovy, Hudson, and Sonar.
- Created multiple prototypes for new product initiatives utilizing the following technologies: 2D barcodes using zxing, J2ME Push Registry, and WURFL/WNG.
- Supported the company’s aggressive hiring by screening and interviewing around 60+ candidates.
Medio Systems
Seattle, Washington, United States
A leader in mobile analytics, specializing in advanced data solutions and innovative analytics platforms.
June 2007 – April 2008
Software Design Engineer
Worked for a white-label mobile search engine company. (~50 employees)
- Designed a web application for managing sites crawled and indexed by Medio. The system was used by content editors, crawl operators, and also by crawl servers via a web service interface. The system ingested logging events from the crawl and index processes. These events could then be queried to help the team produce a better mobile web search index. The application provided a rich internet application containing roughly twenty screens and utilized DWR, JQuery, JFreecharts, Spring, Hibernate, and PostgreSQL.
- Designed a web-based application for conducting search result evaluations. This provided the ability to see how Medio's search engine compared to the competition and the impact of various search engine optimizations on the results. The application also included various reporting features, including dynamic data-driven charts. The application supported multiple evaluation modes, including double-blind, side-by-side, and a type-your-own query mode.
- Designed a mobile version of Wikipedia using the Wikipedia database archives. The application provided a mobile XHTML-compliant Wikipedia search product with article and image search features. This was developed using Spring, Hibernate Search, XHTML-MP, Lucene, JPA, and PostgreSQL.
Technologies utilized were Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, Hudson, and Grails
Red Hat
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
A leading enterprise open-source solutions provider, offering a comprehensive portfolio of products and services.
September 2006 – June 2007
Senior Software Engineer
Worked on the team developing the e-commerce website for managing Red Hat enterprise licenses. (~1500 employees)
- Designed and developed web applications using Spring, Hibernate, Oracle, and Maven 2
- Implemented prototypes for new product initiatives including a mobile rich client application enabling the browsing of text, audio, and video content. The mobile client was produced using J2ME and the low level graphics APIs to produce a polished Red Hat branded interface.
- Led refactoring of order processing and shipping services for the Red Hat storefront. Reduced a significant amount of code and produced a code base that is much easier to maintain and promotes reuse.
- Designed and developed applications to integrate external CRM (Salesforce.com) data with internal financial systems (Oracle Financials). Designed migration scripts to integrate JBoss Salesforce.com data into Red Hat Salesforce.com data after the acquisition of JBoss.
Motricity
Durham, North Carolina, United States
A mobile content provider; known for platform services, content distribution, and pioneering technologies for leading carriers.
April 2005 – September 2006
Senior Software Engineer II
Served as a key technical resource for the core software development team for a mobile content solutions provider in a fast-paced environment. The company's size grew from 140 to 400+ employees in two years.
- Technical Lead for the Fuel Core Client API Team which provided a web service catalog for downloadable mobile content including ringtones, games, and graphics.
- Produced a J2ME MIDlet reference implementation to demonstrate content services to leading mobile phone carriers (also demonstrated at 3GSM and CTIA conferences)
- Accompanied the vice president of Product Development to evaluate partner company technologies for integration with Motricity products
- Implemented various features using EJB, Spring, and Hibernate on award winning mobile content platform, Fuel, which powers leading mobile carriers and service providers including Cingular, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
- Held technical presentations for development group on various topics (JavaOne 2006 topics, Spring Framework, Hibernate, Model Driven Architecture, Mobile Client Development, Netbeans IDE, EE5)
- Provided high quality, thoroughly unit tested code (coverage exceeding 90%)
- Implemented various technologies to introduce more agile development process (Continuous Integration using Cruise Control, Emma for code coverage, MDA, Spring, Groovy)
- Assisted Development Manager with staffing by conducting technical interview of over 60 candidates (often times 3 per week)
- Provided development support for numerous software releases
Technologies used include Spring, Hibernate, J2ME with MIDP, J2EE, EJB, BEA Weblogic, and Oracle.
Mohawk Industries
Dalton, Georgia, United States
World's largest flooring manufacturer.
December 2004 – December 2005
Senior Software Engineer
Designed and developed software systems for a large flooring company (34,000 employees).
- Developed an enterprise Java application to manage high-resolution layouts for flooring sample boards.
- Developed a web-based training system for testing the sales team's knowledge of flooring topics
- Migrated legacy ASP and PHP applications to J2EE.
- Provided internal training on software development best practices and new technologies to coworkers and management (Model Driven Architecture, UML, and object-relational mapping technologies).
Technologies utilized included JBoss, Hibernate, PostgreSQL, and Apache FOP.
Fidelity Investments
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
American multinational financial services corporation.
December 2001 – December 2003
Principal Software Engineer
Designed and developed applications for a large financial service company (~32,000 employees).
- Created a high-capacity distributed Java email marketing system that included detailed reporting, personalized content, and stock trade confirmations with detailed click tracking. The system operated from 3 different locations in the country for redundancy and to reduce WAN charges.
- Designed and developed a multi-client, multi-threaded java web capacity testing tool for performance testing of Web applications.
- Served on a team developing a worldwide collateral distribution system used in Fidelity retail offices for ordering frequently changing mutual fund related collateral. (ASP / J++ / COM)
- Produced a Windows NT service written in Java to provide web-based administration of NT services for operational staff.
Technologies utilized include J2EE, IBM Websphere, Interwoven Teamsite, Solaris, Microsoft IIS, COM, ASP, and Oracle.
Extraprise
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Extraprise helps businesses manage their customer relationships beyond the traditional boundaries of the enterprise.
December 2000 – December 2001
Web Engineer
Designed and developed Java-based web applications for large-scale projects. Managed technical requirements analysis for multiple client engagements. Provided sales team assistance, presenting details of proposed solutions to prospective clients. (~400 employees)
- Served as Technical Lead in producing a database-driven J2EE catalog website, used to distribute product data in multiple languages for a large industrial supply firm.
- Evaluated and recommended technologies and procedures as part of seminar attendance at the web security summit.
- Participated in Vignette Story Server training in San Francisco (Enterprise CMS).
- Mentored junior technical resources by providing training sessions and introducing new technologies.
Technologies utilized included J2EE, Vignette Story Server, IIS, Websphere, MS SQL Server, iPlanet
AMR Research
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Independent supply chain management and enterprise IT research.
December 1997 – December 2000
Manager of Web Operations and Development
Responsible for external and internal web-related services, including website application development, databases, and streaming media servers, for a technology research firm through a period of growth from 35 employees to over 400. Gartner eventually purchased the company.
- Developed web applications for providing access to a large repository of technology research to authenticated subscribers, including hundreds of hours of streaming audio from AMR Research conferences. (Windows Media Server/Real Audio Server)
- Developed LDAP-based website authentication system synchronizing with internal CRM System (over 30,000 user accounts). (Microsoft Site Server 3 / MTS / COM / ASP/ Onyx CRM)
- Evaluated hosting co-location providers.
- Designed and developed web applications for use by various internal departments, such as career opportunities database and resume management tools for HR, content preview account functionality for the marketing department, and content deployment, categorization, and authorization tools for the content production department.
Technologies utilized included Microsoft COM, ASP, Site Server, LDAP, Active Directory, MS SQL Server, Windows Streaming Media Server, Real Audio Server, Perl CGI.
University of South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina, United States
South Carolina's leading public research university
December 1994 – December 1997
Webmaster (College of Engineering)
Supported students, faculty, and staff in implementing web-related content. Produced multimedia presentations for the Dean of the Engineering College at an off-site partnership board retreat to various executives of large corporations such as 3M, Bose, and many others.
- Developed the primary website for the College of Engineering (HTML, Perl)
- Migrated website through web server upgrades (O'Reilly & Associates Website, Netscape Commerce Server, IIS 2)
- Assisted with various networking-related tasks (network equipment troubleshooting, pulling cable, cataloging, and labeling equipment)
Technologies utilized included IIS, ASP, Netscape Commerce, OReilly & Associates Website, Perl, CGI
Contact
Lilliwaup, Washington WA 98555 US
(919) 412-8755
Education
-
1992 1997
University of South Carolina
Bachelors
Media
Skills
Software Architecture & Design
Expert
System Design
Microservices
Serverless Architecture
Cloud Computing
API Design
Scalability
Performance Optimization
Web & Mobile Development
Expert
Full Stack Development
React.js
Next.js
Angular
Node.js
RESTful Services
GraphQL
Progressive Web Apps
Android Development
Cloud & DevOps
Expert
AWS
Google Cloud Platform
CI/CD
Docker
Infrastructure as Code
Monitoring & Logging
Data Management & Analytics
Advanced
SQL
NoSQL
Big Data Technologies
Data Visualization
D3.js
Firebase
Security & Compliance
Advanced
Application Security
Network Security
Compliance Standards
Security Audits
SAST/DAST/Secrets scanning
Encryption & Data Protection
Leadership & Communication
Expert
Technical Leadership
Team Building
Agile Methodologies
Product Management
Mentoring
Innovation & Problem Solving
Expert
Innovative Thinking
Rapid Prototyping
Strategic Planning
Business Analysis
References
I had the opportunity to work with Craig as a front end developer and architect for around 4 years at Geezeo. Craig was instrumental in delivering Geezeo's early ui redesigns, and even more important in reshaping the product from a single page to a set of individual components that Geezeo, or it's partner institutions could string together like Lego bricks. We created and deployed 5 generations of UI framework together. Craig is one of the rare engineers that can help navigate through uncertainty. Craig is willing to take partial ideas and try them and adjust, and his ability to incrementally see and deliver value was hugely important to our success. Craig is also highly focused on business value and always wants to understand and communicate the business goals of technology initiatives. It was a pleasure working with Craig, and I would jump at the opportunity to work with Craig again in the future.
I had the pleasure of hiring and working with Craig for a year on our UA eCommerce re-platforming engagement. Craig is a passionate software architect and technical leader, and he immediately added value to our engagement by complementing our teams' best practices on the MEAN stack. At Twin, we pride ourselves on and teach team members the value of craftsmanship-level quality. Craig was naturally aligned with this value -- and you could see that with his project contributions. He was a big reason we were successful on the UA engagement. Craig is trustworthy as both a team member and technical leader -- and I strongly recommend engaging him if you have an opportunity to do so.
I had the pleasure of directing Craig on projects for our client, Under Armour, including the creation of a new CMS. Craig brought a lot of expertise from both experience and his drive to stay informed on emerging technologies which he successfully leveraged. When we had to tackle complex problems, Craig was eager to take ownership and was dedicated to seeing those solutions through with quality and thoughtfulness. Further, Craig was quick to communicate any blockers to keep us informed of progress. Craig was truly someone I could trust technically and professionally. I would not hesitate to work with him again.
Craig is the best of the best developers I have worked with throughout my career. I've had the privilege to work with him in a couple of companies and he always was on top of everyone technically speaking. I would highly recommend Craig for any project that requires success!
Craig is an excellent developer with knowledge of all the latest web app technologies. He has practical experience throughout the application stack, from front-end markup and javascript to back-end application servers and databases (relational and non-relational). Craig is very professional and understands how to balance adoption of new technology with business risks. He has shown great flexibility in integrating the new with the old and making it work seamlessly.
I worked with Craig at OpenMarket as a PM for some of his projects. Craig was an amazing, hard-working, incredibly smart developer and was one of the most well-respected developers at OpenMarket. Craig was known for his knowledge, experience and passion for all the latest technologies. He was a go-to person when guidance was needed on implementation for complex solutions and was always willing to provide his help to anyone who needed it. I was thrilled to work with him when he decided to move the project that I was working on. He drove the implementation of a new framework and ramped up other devs on the technologies involved. It was a pleasure working with Craig, and I would welcome the opportunity to work with him again.
Craig was an excellent team player and worked long hours to complete projects. His projects would always come in on time with great results.
A true technical leader, Craig focuses on building a comprehensive understanding of prime technologies and expertly employs them to deliver paramount software solutions. Additionally, Craig takes time to mentor his peers both one-on-one and in classroom-like settings. Given the chance, I would work with Craig again.
Craig's the kind of developer whose code isn't just great technically--he's also thinking about the user, the competition and the business. As charter developer selected to lead a highly strategic new project at Motricity, Craig was the guy who really made it happen.
Craig is one of the most complete J2EE developers I've encountered. While working with him, I was continually amazed at the quality of the software he produced. He is an assiduous worker who completes projects on time while also making allowances to learn new technology. He is a mentor and a leader and makes working at Motricity fun.