Jeff Baranski
resume@jeffbaranski.com | Washington, D.C. | https://www.jeffbaranski.com
Summary
Engineering leader with 17+ years experience building and scaling high-availability distributed systems and 3+ years of people leadership experience. Proven track record driving platform modernization, improving system performance and cost efficiency, and developing high-performing engineering teams.
Experience
Capital One 03/2021–02/2024, 09/2024–Present — Senior Manager, Software Engineering
- Lead two teams operating mission-critical real-time web services at 30K+ TPS and 99.999% availability, supporting 100M+ customers and 420M+ accounts, with technical direction, operational excellence, and strategic influence across a 60-person, 12-team organization.
- Develop engineering talent through structured coaching, performance management, and technical mentorship, resulting in 2-3 promotions annually and consistently strong team retention.
- Partner with Product, Architecture, Risk, and business leaders to define multi-quarter platform roadmaps and prioritize engineering investments aligned to enterprise strategy.
- Prior to people management responsibilities, architected and drove platform modernization initiatives that reduced infrastructure spend by $1M+ annually and improved latency of real-time web services by 75% (20ms → 5ms).
- Prior to people management responsibilities, architected and delivered a distributed batch processing pipeline that ingested and processed TB-scale datasets daily to produce 3M+ targeted customer records for 3rd party data sharing reminders, owning the full technical lifecycle from system design through production.
- Technologies: Java, Spring Boot, Cassandra, Python, PySpark, Hadoop, AWS (DynamoDB, ECS Fargate, EMR, Lambda, S3).
CrowdStrike 02/2024-09/2024 - Senior Engineer
- Contributed to the core log ingest pipeline and alerting engine for CrowdStrike LogScale, processing multi-petabyte daily volumes.
- Technologies: Scala, Kafka, AWS (CloudTrail, SQS, 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 (held Secret security clearance).
- 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.
- Achieved $1M in annual AWS infrastructure savings by optimizing autoscaling policies for an EC2 fleet serving real-time web services.
- Led CI/CD modernization for a 50+ developer org, cutting build times by 70% (2.5h → 45m).
- Unlocked federal market opportunities by engineering PKI authentication (PIV/CAC card login) for DoD-compliant security.
- Technologies: Java, JavaEE, EJB, JBoss, Ant, Gradle, Nexus, Jenkins, Docker, ExtJS, XSLT, SOAP, REST, AWS (EC2, CloudFormation).
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