# Avery Gillert > Lead Software Engineer at Welltok, a Virgin Pulse company Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/averygillert Lead Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience with Full-Stack Web Development, with a focus on Backend Architecture. I've helped several companies navigate their legacy architecture and helped proposed plans that brought significant improvements to stability, inspectability, diagnostics, and performance. I am fascinated with architecture and how systems interoperate. I am quick to get up to speed even on complex architectures. I am considered a Subject Matter Expert for the systems I work with. I am often helping my team members out, providing advice on work, and teaching them about lesser known areas of our architecture. I often work with other teams to collaborate and work out details of our plans. I excel in, and greatly enjoy, bug-hunting and diagnostics. I am able to dig into complex issues others find impenetrable. I am very self-reliant and capable of handling most issues, even those outside of my general expertise. I have dabbled in Product Ownership, UI/UX Design, DevOps / Infrastructure, Technical Writing, and other areas when the skills are needed to resolve an issue. If someone brings an issue to me, I am typically the last point of escalation for that issue, even outside of my normal scope, and I work until the issue is resolved. I have learned many new skills and dug into unfamiliar codebases, tools, languages, and more to resolve issues I've been tasked with. Because of my expertise in problem solving, I have been very highly valued at previous companies. At Welltok, I was one of only a few people listed by the CEO as critical to business operations, and who must be retained. One of my primary hobbies is learning, experimenting, and prototyping things I find interesting. I have an insatiable thirst to learn about complex topics that interest me. I've contributed to several open source projects and publish my own work under open source licenses. ## Work Experience ### Lead Software Engineer @ iptiQ by Swiss Re Jan 2022 – Present | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States • Quickly got up to speed on a convoluted legacy system. Served as one of the few experts on the system. Assisted greatly in fielding questions from fellow team members, and helping provide guidance when needed • Pushed for changes to deployment process to reduce frequency of issues with production deployments • Worked with client-facing teams to quickly solve critical production issues and remediate a backlog of historically corrupted data • Designed and led architecture of a new Business Process Model-like state machine for a legacy system to help reduce data integrity issues, improve clarity to our internal teams of what states our Business Objects were in, and ease development • Pushed and implemented solutions for environment parity issues, unit test pass rate / performance problems, consolidation / cleanup of deployment strategy, and other systemic issues creating friction for the team when working with the system ### Lead Software Engineer @ Welltok Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 • Researched and built well-documented proposal for re-building a non-functional acquired consumer mapping system • Proposed integration with existing architecture, and pushed to modernize the system with significant benefits to simplicity, ease of development, and scalability • Worked across large inter-organizational units to develop a unification plan for acquired systems • Handled diagnosing complex issues involving many systems: Diagnosed the root cause of TileJSON map tiles failing to load on only Firefox, which was determined to be a HTTP/1 to HTTP/2 reverse proxy bug triggering a buffer overflow bug inside Firefox. Quickly identified the problem area even in the massive, unfamiliar, codebase of a browser ### Senior Software Engineer @ Welltok Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 • Put forth new architectural patterns for NodeJS microservices. Worked to build up new services and move off the legacy patterns which had complicated development previously. • Assisted swapping out legacy code via facades with newer, more flexible approaches. • Greatly improved Engineer & Operations productivity / troubleshooting ability by pushing for system-wide Distributed Tracing, with an improved JSON-based logging approach • Built a Rules-based Calculation Engine for providing a consistent view of a user despite the variety of backing data sources • Built a Graph-based Compiler for dynamically building up Elasticsearch queries based on a simplified user-facing query language • Assisted with hardening legacy services to improve reliability • Collaborated in architectural discussions to ensure new work was done with a maintainable approach • Helped facilitate communication and cooperation with other teams • Provided support to blocked work, and Junior Engineers ### Software Engineer @ Welltok Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 • Worked heavily with legacy services to understand core workings after original developers left • Became go-to resource for services others were typically reluctant to touch • Provided immediate support for production issues with legacy services ### Release Engineer @ Welltok Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 ### Software Engineer @ WiserTogether, Inc. Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 • Improved discoverability for thousands of health conditions and treatments by replacing legacy search system with a ElasticSearch/Python based system • Lead migration off legacy Adobe Analytics platform to self-hosted Piwik. Improved usability of analytics reporting and implemented additional reporting suites on top of Piwik. • Helped reduce workload of content team by introducing new tools to manage mailing lists for tens of thousands users ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/avery-gillert-3b636a235 --- Source: https://flows.cv/averygillert JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/averygillert/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-31