Robert Smieja

Polyglot Full-stack Software Engineer

Experience

FIS/WorldPay, Remote - Lowell, MA

August 2023 - Present

Senior Software Engineer

  • Mentored junior engineers in designing and implementing a complex, large-volume SQL application framework for high-throughput data processing.
  • Delivered the V2 upgrade of a critical internal API integration between two financial transaction platforms, establishing a more robust system for automated reconciliation.
  • Spearheaded the internal adoption of GitHub Copilot, evaluating its impact on developer velocity and establishing best practices for LLM-based agentic tooling.
  • Optimized nightly build system to reduce daily I/O storage array load by 10-20% to ensure pipelines finished on time.
  • Selected to attend a software developer conference and present back to the wider engineering group.

Quattr, Remote - Palo Alto, CA

August 2021 - August 2023

Principal Full-Stack Engineer

  • Key contributor to the search optimization UI, focusing on the interface for the AI/ML-driven recommendation system, which directly influences customer acquisition.
  • Proposed, designed, and implemented several modules in Python for rules engine design to enable a self-service interface for customers to create rules to categorize search queries.
  • Led a cross-functional initiative to reduce technical debt and improve code quality by defining quality standards, testing practices, and promoting best practices across two remote teams.
  • Achieved a 15% reduction in AWS Cloud costs by deleting and compressing objects in S3 buckets.
  • Designed and implemented email based secure passwordless login system for test drive demos, including UI.
  • Drove major technical debt reduction by upgrading critical libraries (NextJS 9->12, React 16->17, Node 12->14), significantly improving security posture and stability.
  • Drove effort to replace out-of-date Okta integration with custom implementation in order to improve end-user experience, strengthen security posture, and reduce cost.

Hitachi Vantara, Waltham, MA

July 2019 - August 2021

Senior Full Stack Engineer

  • Java and TypeScript/JavaScript application code contributor for internal platform team to unify Hitachi Vantara storage and data applications.
  • Drove the design and complex system implementation for the rewrite of a product development SaaS platform, leveraging Kubernetes to standardize and unify storage/data applications.
  • Implemented brand new UI written in React/TypeScript for an internal administrative UI for Hitachi Vantara software appliances and SaaS installations.
  • Simplified management of development lab software configuration by introducing Ansible.
  • Improved quality of internal product development platform documentation website by introducing Docusaurus for other Hitachi developers.

Vantiv/WorldPay, Lowell, MA

May 2015 - July 2019

Senior Software Engineer

  • Led a team of 4 junior engineers in an integration with AmazonPay as its first external client; drove the design and mentored the team in the implementation.
  • Selected out of 150 Java engineers to form a team of 6 to upgrade Grails app for client configuration management due to ability to quickly learn new languages (Groovy) and frameworks (Grails v1 and v2); delivered by converting 100k+ lines and 1k+ tests within 1 year.
  • Led teams in 2 company-wide and office-wide hackathons as Team Captain with 1 victory.
  • Made key contributions on a team of 8 in the company's #1 project in 2018: an upgrade of a credit card dispute system to comply with new Visa regulations.
  • Reduced technical debt and improved developer efficiency by converting a 1 million+ line Java codebase from Ant to Gradle, cutting build times by ~15%.
  • Improved system reliability by refactoring frequently broken Puppet automation for server provisioning, modularizing the code and adding tests.

Profile

Senior polyglot engineer specializing in the design and delivery of complex, scalable systems. Proponent of modern developer tooling to enhance team velocity and efficiency. Committed to engineering excellence, with a focus on strategic modernization and refactoring to improve code stability, strengthen security posture, and optimize build pipelines.

Technologies

Programming Languages
In order of experience/proficiency:
  • Java
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Groovy
  • Kotlin
  • Python
  • Golang
  • SQL
  • Powershell
  • C#
  • Ruby
Clouds
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Azure
Databases
  • Amazon DynamoDB
  • DB2 (LUW)
  • PostgreSQL
  • Snowflake
Frameworks/Libraries/Software
  • React
  • NextJS
  • Gatsby.js
  • Kafka
  • Gradle
  • Grails
  • JavaEE
  • Spring MVC 5
  • Spring Data 5
Operating Systems
  • Windows
  • Mac OS X
  • / Linux (RHEL/Ubuntu)

DevOps

  • Ansible
  • Docker
  • Puppet
  • Kubernetes

Education

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA May 2015
Bachelor of Science, Double Major in Computer Science & Interactive Media and Game Development
Received
WPI Presidential Merit Scholarship, 2011 – 2015