Jeff Baranski
resume@jeffbaranski.com | Washington, D.C. | https://www.jeffbaranski.com
Summary
Hands-on Software Engineering Manager with 17 years experience building highly available, scalable, and performant software serving millions of daily active users.
Experience
Capital One 09/2024-Present - Senior Manager, Software Engineering
- Manage two distributed teams (~10 software engineers) building mission-critical platform APIs serving every Capital One line of business as source of truth for customer account data across 100M+ customers and 420M+ accounts.
- Active on-call participant and final escalation point for platform APIs in critical path of customer actions (logins, account balance view, funding, payments, data sharing, etc…) processing 20k transactions per second at <5ms average latency, 99.999% uptime, supporting 300+ internal clients.
- Drive technical strategy and product roadmap across multiple teams and organizations; recruit and scale high-performing teams; mentor engineers on architecture, system design, and career growth.
- Technologies: Java, Spring Boot, Python, Cassandra, AWS (Lambda, ECS, S3, DynamoDB).
CrowdStrike 02/2024-09/2024 - Senior Engineer
- Log ingest and real-time alerting engine processing multi-petabyte daily volumes.
- Technologies: Scala, Kafka, AWS (CloudTrail, SQS, S3).
Capital One 03/2021-02/2024 - Manager, Lead Software Engineer
- Manage a distributed team (~5 software engineers) building mission-critical platform APIs serving every Capital One line of business as source of truth for customer account data across 100M+ customers and 420M+ accounts.
- Architected performance optimization eliminating redundant downstream calls: 75% faster response times (20ms -> 5ms), 85% reduction in downstream API load (2.7B -> 405M daily requests), 65% reduction in infrastructure costs ($1M -> $350k annually). Improved system-wide reliability while reducing operational complexity.
- Architected big data pipeline for customer security notifications: Delivered system processing 3M+ notifications daily. Awarded Q2 2022 “relentless commitment to excellence” for leading cross-functional initiative from concept to production launch.
- Drive technical strategy and product roadmap; recruit and build high-performing team; mentor engineers on architecture, system design, and career growth.
- Technologies: Java, Spring Boot, Python, PySpark, Hadoop, Cassandra, AWS (Lambda, ECS, EMR, S3).
Verisign 03/2020-03/2021 - Software Engineer III
- Authentication web services for global domain name registrar infrastructure.
- Technologies: Java, Spring, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Ansible, OpenCloud.
Knexus Research Corporation 01/2019-03/2020 - Senior Software Engineer
- AI search services and geospatial visualization UI for DoD customer.
- Technologies: Java, Python, TypeScript, Angular, OpenStreetMap.
Infor 02/2009-01/2019 - Senior Software Engineer
- Technical lead for a distributed team of 6 engineers (US and offshore in Hyderabad, India); conducted regular onsite visits in Hyderabad for technical coaching and knowledge transfer.
- Architected AWS auto-scaling solution: Delivered $1M annual infrastructure cost savings while maintaining service reliability.
- Modernized build and CI/CD infrastructure: Migrated legacy Ant build to Gradle, reducing build times 70% (2.5 hours→45 minutes); designed and administered Jenkins pipelines, Nexus artifact repository, and Docker Registry. Improved developer productivity and deployment efficiency.
- Led large-scale UI modernization: Part of 4-person architecture team migrating 1,500+ screens to Ext JS, enabling multi-browser support and modern user experience.
- Implemented PKI authentication for DoD customers: Delivered PIV/CAC card login capability alongside existing SAML and LDAP SSO authentication mechanisms.
Education
- MS in Computer Science 08/2022: Vanderbilt University (GPA: 4.0/4.0)
- BS in Computer Science 12/2008: University of South Carolina Upstate
Certifications
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate 01/2025-01/2028