# Mark A. Hilkert > Full Stack Software Engineer Location: Greater Chicago Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/markahilkert At a minimum, I write software; but more than that, I work with a team to solve complex problems. Whether I’ve been solving hands-on engineering problems (B.S. chemical engineering), dreaming up abstract ways to model chemical systems using quantum mechanics (M.S. theoretical chemistry), or writing software to model the effect of drug legalization on violent crime rates (J.D.), I’ve always tackled tough problems. Now I am using those skills to build web applications. ## Work Experience ### Sr. Software Engineer II @ Enova International Jan 2025 – Present | Chicago, IL ### Senior Software Engineer @ Walmart Global Tech Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Sunnyvale, California, United States - Developed and maintained a robust data pipeline that manages Walmart’s extensive catalog. This pipeline, powered by Java microservices, Cassandra, and Kafka, processes billions of events daily. - Led a critical migration project: Successfully moved over 50 Kafka topics from the public cloud to Walmart’s private cloud. This delicate task involved coordinating with over 30 teams to ensure a seamless migration without any data loss. - Revamped test suites: Introduced functional testing and boosted code coverage to an 90% for several services. - Tested performance for holiday traffic surge: Analyzed REST endpoints on eight applications using Walmart’s SaaS continuous testing platform. Determined the maximum throughput for a single production-like pod for each application, which was used to size the apps and prepare for Walmart’s stress testing for the holiday season. ### Backend Engineer @ TED Conferences Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | New York, New York, United States - Designed and implemented features for TED’s robust backend systems. These systems, built on Ruby on Rails services, seamlessly communicated via Google Protobuf on Amazon Kinesis to a GraphQL service for the front end. - Updated a critical application from Rails 5 to Rails 6. The update allowed the team to add a new framework that was incompatible with Rails 5 and prevented the application version from reaching the end of life. - Streamlined software distribution: Migrated our internal software packages from a private server to Github Packages, allowing the team to end support for the old server and improving security. ### Software Engineer II @ Inventables Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Chicago, Illinois, United States - Developed and maintained Inventables’ eCommerce website: with a Ruby on Rails back end, React and jQuery frontend, and MySql database. - Optimized performance: Updated the website’s caching scheme from observer-based caching to Russian-doll nesting fragment caching, significantly improving page-load times. - Revamped shipping code: Re-wrote the site’s shipping code to integrate with our third-party-fulfillment API and support multiple shipping methods and fulfillment locations. The improved shipping code enabled the team to flexibly adjust the shipping cost and apply promotions like free shipping. - Integrated third-party protection plans for Inventables’ best-selling product. - Proactively set up alerts: Set up email notifications for an API error that previously failed silently. This helped us catch an unannounced API update that was causing our code to fail, which allowed us to find and fix the problem within hours. ### Software Engineer I @ Inventables Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Greater Chicago Area ### Ruby on Rails Engineer @ Groupon Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Greater Chicago Area - Legacy System Stewardship: On a small team of just two developers, took over support of a legacy Rails application that interacted with Groupon’s large databases in an ecosystem with hundreds of microservices. This application managed customer-facing data, processed customer information, and managed customer funds. - GDPR Compliance Automation: Created a tool to automate the removal of customer personally identifiable information from Groupon and its partners’ databases to comply with the GDPR. This tool eliminated the need for a script that was previously run daily and was prone to human error. ### Full Stack Developer @ Actualize Coding Bootcamp Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Chicago, IL - Sleep Coach: Built an app to help users improve sleep by monitoring how their behaviors impact their sleep. Sleep Coach features a simple, intuitive design and was developed using Ruby on Rails and Vue.js. It includes authentication, authorization, single-table inheritance, and a Bootstrap 4 theme. - LynxIn: Built a LinkedIn parody (focused on helping cats develop professional relationships) with 5 peers, including the ability for “cats” to connect with each other. LynxIn incorporates Bootstrap and follows RESTful routing conventions. - Built a web app from the ground up using the Sinatra Framework that includes routes, a gemfile, views, the activerecord gem, dynamic routes, and API routes to return data in json format. - Mentored new students on problem-solving techniques, Ruby, Rails, and time-management. - Presented a lightning talk on the importance of sleep and was the only student asked by Actualize to write up their talk. The writeup was incorporated into Actualize’s curriculum. - Bootcamp: Attended a full-time, intensive 12-week bootcamp focused on using Ruby on Rails and Vue.js to build web apps. Solved Ruby problems in pairs daily for 8 weeks; built web apps for three group projects in teams of 4, 6, and 15 people; and built and presented Sleep Coach as a Capstone project. ### Staff Attorney, Commercial Transactions @ Discover Financial Services Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Riverwoods, IL - Drafted, negotiated, and managed a high volume of contracts, including master software license agreements, trial and evaluation agreements, master services agreements, SaaS agreements, GDPR agreements, non-disclosure agreements, task orders, and statements of work with approval authority up to $5MM. - Ensured that Discover’s minimum data security standards were met in every contract. - Re-wrote Discover’s template NDA from scratch using plain English to be concise and clear. The new NDA is now used company-wide and was presented to our legal interns as an example of effective legal writing. ### Patent Extern @ United States District Court for the Central District of California Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Greater Los Angeles Area - Worked exclusively on patent cases for four district-court judges - Drafted bench memoranda and proposed orders, including significant contributions on summary judgment, Daubert, and claim construction orders. ### Summer Associate @ Morrison & Foerster LLP Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | San Diego, CA Drafted memoranda for supervising attorneys, including research for major client in the firm's London office; assisted in preparation and presentation of factual and legal issues, with accompanying PowerPoint presentation, for arbitration presented by firm partner. ### Clinical Intern @ USC Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 - Successfully petitioned the U.S. Copyright Office to consider a legal exemption that allows farmers to repair or modify their own agricultural equipment. - Co-wrote a comment supporting the exemption, incorporating on-site farmer interviews I helped conduct. - Researched the computer technology that controls agricultural machinery, analyzed whether modifying it would violate Copyright Law, and included my conclusions in the comment. ### Judicial Extern to the Honorable James V. Selna @ U.S. District Court for the Central District of California Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Santa Ana, CA - Analyzed motion, opposition, and reply briefs; wrote tentative orders; and listened to oral arguments before making weekly ruling recommendations to Judge Selna. - Drafted five orders that were posted as final. ### Graduate Research Assistant @ University of California, Irvine Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 - Worked in a research group that developed theoretical chemistry software. Wrote BASH scripts to automate chemical calculations by interfacing electronic structure software with a local computer cluster. - Communicated technical information between theoretical and inorganic chemistry groups to produce an overview of a novel compound. See publication. - Tested the accuracy of newly coded functions to model electron interactions in complex chemical systems. This work was used as evidence of the model’s accuracy. ### Graduate Teaching Assistant @ University of California, Irvine Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 | Irvine, California - Taught physics to chemistry graduate students in weekly lectures and discussions. - Ensured young chemists followed safety standards in their first lab course. Demonstrated proper lab techniques and troubleshot malfunctioning equipment. ### Undergraduate Student Researcher @ The Ohio State University Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 | The Ohio State University - Took linear algebra and graduate-level quantum mechanics courses to understand and contribute to a research group focused on building chemistry software to model large chemical systems. - Used sed, grep, and awk in BASH to organize large quantiles of data, which was then interpreted to determine if the data was consistent with our model’s predictions (and reality). - Found evidence to support a new non-radiative decay mechanism of DNA. This evidence was used to explore the mechanism by which ultraviolet radiation causes skin cancer. ## Education ### Doctor of Law (J.D.) University of Southern California Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 ### Master of Science (M.S.) in Theoretical Chemistry UC Irvine Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Chemical Engineering The Ohio State University Jan 2004 – Jan 2009 ### University of Southern California ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/markhilkert --- Source: https://flows.cv/markahilkert JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/markahilkert/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22