# Jason Burke > Multi-stack Technologist Location: Greater Boston, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jasonburke With over 20 years of self-taught coding and software development experience, I am a multi-stack technologist who can learn and adapt to new skills and technologies. I have worked with various industries and domains, including education, biomedicine, media, and travel, delivering scalable and innovative solutions that meet user needs and business goals. Most recently, I was a Flights Solution Engineer at Google, where I wrote the backend integration for Spirit Airlines, optimized the messaging workflow, and communicated with partner representatives. I leveraged microservice architecture, distributed computing, and CI/CD services, and contributed to a sophisticated code base with high standards of readability and testing. I also have extensive experience with Apache Solr, which I used to overhaul McGraw-Hill's enterprise search engine. I am passionate about creating user-friendly and efficient web applications, and I enjoy collaborating with diverse teams and stakeholders. ## Work Experience ### Flights Solution Engineer at Google through Modis @ Modis Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Cambridge, MA • Wrote the backend integration to Spirit Airlines for Book on Google. Handled user requests, retrieved eligible ancillary offerings, and processed payment info using a microservice architecture in a distributed computing environment. Leveraged CI/CD services. • Optimized messaging workflow by reducing the number of API calls to an IATA NDC gateway. Adopted stringent coding mechanics with emphasis on readability for contributing to a sophisticated code base. Participated in code review processes. Wrote unit and regression tests for TDD. • Communicated with partner representatives at Spirit to manage expectations, work through problems, and obtain details required for technical solutions. Contributed to internal documentation. • Created a NDC java library used in the onboarding of additional airline partners. Worked on premium baggage support for Peakwork integration with BoG. ### Principal Software Engineer @ iSpecimen Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Lexington, Massachusetts, United States • Joined a small development team as a first new member in over two years to bring a fresh voice and share enterprise coding experience to move towards a more scalable platform • Introduced Object Oriented Design principles e.g. moving the logic to create objects from Controller methods to DTO constructors for encapsulating functionality, promoting reusability, and reinforcing MVC architecture. Delivered an OO domain model in a way to reduce Enumerated data • Upgraded web conventions to HTML5, reduced the amount of JS required by over 2/3 through working with developers to find new ways of submitting dynamic form data, including and not limited to sync and async file submission using the FormData object • Shared professional experiences in Agile coding and introduced new methods such as retrospectives. Assisted product managers in creating stories regarding technical debt when such problems limited approval of feature requests • Took a widget concept from long term planning and worked with developers to build an extensible jQuery UI Widget with custom events, behavior and validation ### Sr Software Engineer, Solr Expert, DevOps @ McGraw-Hill Education Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | Greater Boston Area • Responsible for overhauling McGraw-Hill's enterprise search engine used by students, teachers, parents and school admins to find products/programs, plus site wide content and corporate information. Combined 6 existing search indices for a single corpus with multiple document types to create a unified search experience. Collaborated working sessions with several teams to set conventions for storage and data translation to the Solr input feed. Technologies included AWS, Apache Solr, Spring Data and Spring Batch among others. Optimizing the index was an ongoing process • Established a baseline scoring algorithm for documents with varying entity fields to create an apples to apples comparison between mangos and pineapples. Applied business rules from stakeholders. Added Table Of Contents data and other information points for a more qualified result set. Iteratively crafted a multiple objective scoring algorithm to satisfy newness requirements, locate very specific content, and sift through hay in a haystack • Provided a utility for marketing to specify the top results to commonly used queries for Solr in a cloud-based environment via Jenkins. This effectively made the search engine a marketing tool to boost high-grossing products for very general queries without affecting algorithmic scores. IOW: marketers can specify the top results for vague queries • Authored static templates for dynamic product pages following W3C standards and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This was writing the open body, everything in between, and the close body tags to implement Photoshop designs with Bootstrap, HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript for responsive display across five different device viewports via 1 page • Introduced new standards and conventions for agile teams to follow ensuring consistency and reusability in the codebase. Wrote extensible UI widgets implementing the jQuery UI Widget Factory pattern as code to be consumed by other developers ### UI Developer @ Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Cambridge, MA • Developed highly interactive front end to Open Access Automation interfacing NIBR scientists with lab equipment. The UI supported different machine configurations with adjustable settings via dynamic FormData objects. Two way communication with server enabled real time updates on the client • Created custom reusable jQuery widgets implementing the jQuery UI Widget Factory for displaying chromatograms, mass spectra, and other tools with scalable vector graphics (SVG) and other bleeding edge web technologies that are now used in other projects at NIBR • Wrote server side Groovy script for processing proprietary data formats from Tecan Instruments, performing calculations and writing JSON for custom interactive data visualizations • Worked on multiple projects in parallel utilizing latest HTML5 technologies including Web Sockets for real time data updates, and Bootstrap web framework for creating responsive interfaces optimized for any screen width from mobile to larger monitor displays • Switched to working with Microsoft .Net after using Java technologies for years with no down time and took over another project using Knockout.js without prior experience ### Sr Software Engineer @ Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Cambridge, MA • Worked closely with documentation specialists in building CMS product for NIH (National Institute of Health) to reliably serve as a web portal for the LINCS Project and LINCS Centers. Tracking with Google Analytics shows the enterprise app has been accessed from over 50 countries around the World. Technologies used for this project include: Groovy, Grails, Hibernate, Weceem, and several technologies from the Spring Source stack • Created highly customized tools for CMap Team including plate map validation tool for 384 well plates used with experiments in bio labs for validating and analyzing test results. HTML5, SVG (scalable vector graphics), D3.js, jQuery UI widget factory, and Google Visualizations have been part of creating new tools for biologists to query and interact with data. Other technologies include Spring Integration, Spring Web MVC, Spring Validation, Spring Security, Hibernate, Groovy and Grails • Engineered Clinical Outcome app prototype for helping to successfully obtain grant funding experimental research in cancer diseases of the Liver and Brain. App communicates with Gene Pattern, another Cancer Program product for gene expression analysis. This is a 5-tier app with a range of technologies from front to back • Prepared and presented two separate 90 minute talks on Groovy and Grails for the Software Engineering community at the Broad Institute with a focus on rapid development, reusable code and maintainable software ### Java Developer @ EnerNOC Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | Boston, MA Created a J2EE status/reporting app to plan and predict power related emergency events across the country based on information collected from multiple web services and protocols (SOAP, REST) ### Software Consultant @ Clovr Media, Inc. Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 | Boston, MA • Designed and developed Groovy & Grails app with Java and jQuery for the administration of a cutting edge platform early in development stages, client application for consuming SOAP based Web Services, collaborated with other team members in implementing communicative dynamics with backend under concurrent development • Maven2 used for project management and build life cycle control of dependencies, plugins: JaxB2 for un/marshaling of POJO’s/XML from contract first Web Service definitions (xsd’s), Maven-Grails-Compiler (alternative to Ant), Spring Web Services client library, Spring-Security Core & UI • Administration of platform included management of User Roles with respective levels of privileges to all operations defined in Controllers, Remember Me services provide restrictions on operations according to different levels of authentication (is-authenticated-remembered, is-authenticated-full, et cetera), ACL for administrators of different user groups and access permissions • Human-Computer Interaction expertise and analysis used to create rich Web 2.0 client featuring jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Theming and multiple jQuery Plugins, platform and browser independence as high priority goals, highly interactive and intuitive user oriented design, initial wireframes produced with Balsamiq Mockups ### Web Engineer @ Acquire Media Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 | Burlington, Massachusetts, United States • Implemented the highly interactive and AJAX intensive search page for the new NewsEdge.com using Dojo's Topic API in conjunction with a simulated class system modeled after the prototype-based object orientation works of Douglas Crockford, this core functionality was designed as a tool for both novice and advanced users of NewsEdge to create search queries with Acquire Media's proprietary search syntax ### Software Consultant @ Building Engines, Inc. Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 • Developed both the client and server side functionality to incorporate a Topaz Signature Tablet to capture signatures from an LCD screen and display the input on a web page in real-time to subsequently accept the image or reset the device • Developed a multi-threaded Java Swing desktop application to connect with and handle a raw mjpg stream to display the video feed & write buffered images to jpeg files on command ### Web Applications Developer @ Newbury Networks Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 | Boston, MA • Developed a multi-tier enterprise Java web application using J2EE and EJB technologies on JBoss as an in-house solution for managing Newbury product licenses while contributing to regular team meetings for the “analyze-design-implement” project life-cycle • Authored the very first Technical Developer’s Guide to describe usage of SOAP based web-service API’s for Newbury’s Location Appliance including several example usages of the SOAP API with Perl, Python and Ruby. This document was delivered to Newbury OEM partners and used by engineers to developing applications on top of the Newbury location platform • Volunteered to assist QA team with applying test plans and diagnosing issues to help meet critical deadlines, and to write a new architectural design pattern document for using Ext JS with future Newbury application UI’s ### Multi-platform programmer/administrator @ Northeastern University Jan 2005 – Jan 2005 • Shared partial responsibility for maintaining consistency and stability of system-wide Windows domain. • Wrote server-side windows script to poll and record PC Lab terminal usage statistics and trends to be displayed on a web page for students and faculty. • Built and deployed a new system wide DNS registration server for multiple subnets and platforms. ## Education ### Dual Major in Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology (not completed) in Comp Sci, Cog Psych, AI/ML, HCI, Info Ret. Northeastern University ### Landmark ### High School Diploma in Computer Science Mansfield High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jasonpaulburke - Portfolio: https://www.karenyoungendowment.org --- Source: https://flows.cv/jasonburke JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jasonburke/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-31