San Antonio, Texas, United States
Nearpod provides a platform for teachers to engage directly with students in an interactive learning environment. As a Core Platforms Engineer, I enabled cutting edge development across the organization by providing tools for widespread success;
I developed a search platform for configuring and managing an AWS OpenSearch environment via GitLab CI/CD pipelines and Helm / Kubernetes deployments. As part of this platform, I developed a NestJS Microservice that allowed internal APIs to search lesson data spread across MySQL, Magento, and user-generated content, and even provide realtime search suggestions. We used this platform to iteratively improve search accuracy and user engagement across the platform.
I developed a batched data warehouse in AWS Redshift using DBT and Gitlab CI/CD pipelines that allow our data engineers to build sophisticated reporting pipelines with SQL models, complete with data freshness and stability testing, and automated scheduling of daily pipelines. Internally, our team uses this same platform to configure and maintain our Redshift data warehouse with automated tooling.
I developed NPM and PIP software packages for Node JavaScript, NestJS, and Python developers to use internally for integration with our tools, as well as the CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure for delivering these packages via Gitlab releases. I worked with our team to build custom CLI tools and scripts to automate local development work and provide realtime metrics from our developers via logs collected in OpenSearch.
I researched the use of generative AI to enhance our user experience, leveraging the OpenAI development platform for internal and customer-facing tools.
I promoted internal use of our own platform and technology for training and meetings, championed the use of automation, testing, and standardization, implemented modern software development practices into older codebases, and developed architecture that promotes secure data governance practices.
2022 — 2023
San Antonio, Texas, United States
Nearpod provides a platform for teachers to engage directly with students in an interactive learning environment. As a Core Platforms Engineer, I maintain a multi-environment ElasticSearch / OpenSearch cluster that integrates lesson metadata from across multiple storage platforms. I completed projects to integrate a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline for config migrations via GitLab and Kubernetes, provide global search functionality across Magento and SQL data stores, and optimized text analysis to improve performance at search time.
2018 — 2021
San Antonio, Texas, United States
USAA offers high quality, competitive automobile insurance to military members and their families. As a developer operations engineer, Lana developed CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery) pipelines for GitLab SCM and championed state-of-the-art web development practices. She also developed integrations for an inhouse DevOps resource provisioning application which automatically created permissions and resources for developers in GitLab, JFrog Artifactory, RedHat OpenShift/Kubernetes, qTest, SonarQube, AWS, and many other platforms. Lana also lead efforts to implement SRE (Software Reliability Engineering) best practices across multiple applications, providing SLI (Service Level Indicator) metrics from the platforms that could then be used to develop formal SLOs (Service Level Objectives). As a result of this initiative, Lana oversaw availability and latency improvements across the board, using the data she exposed to inform quick and efficient iterative development to drive up developer satisfaction. Lana currently works to maintain multiple applications utilizing several different languages and technologies, including Bash, Node.js, Couchbase, Express, React, Go/Golang, Java, SpringBoot, and Oracle SQL. She founded USAA's Golang Developer Group and spearheaded initiatives to support Golang internally as an architecturally approved language.
San Antonio, Texas
As a software engineer focusing on developer operations, Lana assists the Delivery Automation Enablement team in developing tools to accelerate developer productivity and streamline the process of creating applications between multiple services and pipelines.
2016 — 2018
New Jersey
Prevalent is the leader in third-party risk management and cyber threat intelligence, helping global organizations manage and monitor the security threats and risks associated with third and fourth-party vendors.
As a software engineer, Lana worked on the Prevalent Vendor Threat Monitor team to develop and maintain SaaS third party vendor threat monitoring. Lana modernized Prevalent's data collection pipeline, introduced front-facing features such as the notification center and engagement benchmarking, and implemented proactive threat prediction algorithms for VendorThreatIQ and Potential Threat Impact.
Following her time on VTM, Lana briefly joined the Datumsec/Inspect team as a team leader. There, she organized sprints and stand-up meetings, and integrated the project with Prevalent's Scrum/Agile methodology. She is currently working to develop a new prototype application that integrates Prevalent services into a single, easy-to-use UI.
Worked using JavaScript on front-end and back-end, with HTML5 and SCSS used for display
Implemented new backend algorithms and pipelines for data collection, threat prediction, and risk scoring.
Designed and developed client-facing modules such as engagement benchmarking, monitoring reports, and a notification center.
Improved performance of ETL data collection, e-mail notifications, and client/server requests.
Writes tests for new and existing features following a TDD (test driven design) development paradigm.
Implemented a CI (Continuous Integration) process using TeamCity that automatically runs unit tests and calculates code coverage for all VCS commits, and deploys to the staging environment for successful builds on the default branch.
Uses MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, Java, and Node.js to develop feature-rich, Web 2.0, SaaS platforms and RESTful APIs used by large enterprises.
Organized daily standup and weekly grooming sessions in line with Prevalent's agile methodology.
Education
2015 — 2016
Fullstack Academy
Full stack Development
2015 — 2016
2012 — 2014
DigiPen Institute of Technology
Computer Science and Game Design
2012 — 2014
2008 — 2012
Morris County Vocational School District
High School Diploma
2008 — 2012