John Cruikshank's Resume

Contact

www.linkedin.com/in/cruikshj

Objective

Software engineer, architect and leader seeking to continue a career in software development with focusing on architecture, DevSecOps and building successful teams.

Technical Skills

DevOps, DevSecOps, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Docker, ASP.NET Core, .NET, JavaScript, Microsoft Azure, Vuejs

Education

Milwaukee School of Engineering

B.S. Software Engineering (May 2007)

Employment

Zywave - Milwaukee, WI

Vice President of Engineering (2021 - Present)

Manage and lead an organization of autonomous development teams.
Responsible for technical diligence and integration of aquired products.
Team lead of a cross functional team to formalize and facilitate a modern DevSecOps practice.
Continue to consult on all development teams for engineering best practices and architecture.
Continue to facilitate and lead a community of practice for software architecture across all the teams.
Continue to facilitate and lead a community of practice for production reliability across all the teams.

Principal Software Architect, Director of Engineering (2018 - 2021)

Manage (directly and indirectly) an organization of ~40 software engineers.
Team lead of a cross functional team to formalize and facilitate a modern DevSecOps practice.
Continue to consult on all development teams for engineering best practices and architecture.
Continue to facilitate and lead a community of practice for software architecture across all the teams.
Continue to facilitate and lead a community of practice for production reliability across all the teams.
Continue to be a maintainer of the internal SDKs for building services, jobs, and applications.

Principal Software Architect (2014 - 2018)

Team lead and manager of a development team the built a federated authentication and authorization system for use by the entire Zywave suite.
Consulted on all development teams for engineering best practices and architecture.
Continued to facilitate and lead a community of practice for software architecture across all the teams.
Facilitated and lead a community of practice for production reliability across all the teams.
Primary maintainer of the internal SDKs for building services, jobs, and applications.

Lead Software Architect (2012 - 2014)

Team lead and manager of a development team that built and released two new applications for the Zywave product suite.
Lead Architect for the development organization.
Reported directly to department head.
Facilitated and lead a community of practice for software architecture across all the teams.
Modernized the platform on which applications were built.

FIS (Metavante) - Milwaukee, WI

Note: Metavante became part of FIS in 2009. As part of this merger, the title system changed from a 'Software Development Engineer' track to a 'Programmer Analyst' track.

Programmer Analyst Senior (2010 - 2012)

Architect on the department's architecture team.
Primary designer and mentor of the department's Agile/Scrum process.
Designed and prototyped a Mobile application version of the primary application using ASP.NET MVC and JQuery Mobile.
Designed and prototyped a new "Strong Authentication" UI to replace the legacy authentication UI.
Developed an automated build, deployment and testing process.
Continuing in roles specified below.

Software Development Engineer II (2008 - 2010)

Served as chairman of the enterprise .NET Forum.
Continuing in roles specified below.

Software Development Engineer I (2007 - 2008)

Architect, team lead, and developer on the completely redesigned and rebuilt from scratch payments web application to serve hundreds of thousands of users.
Architect and developer of an extensive enterprise level web application development framework built on .NET.
Served on several enterprise forums including the .NET Forum, the AJAX Forum, and the SOA forum.
Extensive development using .NET, ASP.NET WebForms and MVC, JQuery web services, and more.

Helwig Carbon Products - Milwaukee, WI

Software Engineering and IT Intern (2005 - 2007)

Designed and developed several web applications in production use.
Created a Software Development Standard in use by the developers.
Handled daily IT issues.

Professional Achievements

At Zywave

Acting as a key leader in restructuring the growing Zywave organization into a series of empowered teams with clear missions and desired outcomes. Have been designated as the "Business Lead" of four of those teams, responsible for ensuring the team is successful. Specifically responsible for budgeting, resourcing and facilitating broad organizational needs.
Considered a thought leader by the organization, as a participant in formal "key issue" discussions with the executive team.
Grew from managing a single development team to directing the entire software engineering organization at Zywave of around 40 engineers.
Established a DevSecOps team and practice to enable all Zywave development teams to move toward high quality and high velocity continuous delivery.
Have continuously led and facilitated the Engineering community of practice at Zywave, enabling knowledge sharing and cross team collaboration.
Have continuously led and facilitated the Site Reliability community of practice at Zywave, ensuring that our production environment is available, reliable, and performant.
Acted as the principal architect over the entire Zywave portfolio of applications and services (over thirty applications and hundreds of services).
Acted as the team lead and manager of multiple successful development teams, building critical systems used across the Zywave application suite, including a modern federated authentication and authorization platform.
Maintained a deep knowledge of the technologies to build software by remaining a very active individual contributor while taking on a variety of larger responsibilities.
Orchestrated the modernization the Zywave service stack multiple times to build and maintain a high level of quality and innovation across the Zywave suite. First, by modernizing and standardizing the service oriented architecture. Second, by shifting from a WCF based service stack to an HTTP RESTful service stack. Third, by standing up an on-prem Kubernetes cluster and containerizing the service stack.
Received a variety of awards and recognitions for outstanding commitment and dedication to the success of Zywave.

Early Career

Risen to considerable challenges and earned a reputation of having a strong aptitude toward architecture, clean code and UI design.
Served as the chairman of the FIS .NET Forum for a year. The FIS forums are groups of representatives from all FIS teams, which meet to discuss and publish documentation on coding standards and practices, new technologies, and reusable assets.
Chosen to be a founding member of a new architecture team made of a few choice team members in the department. This team is responsible for defining all architecture going forward, as well as prototyping new products and applications before they are turned over to development.
Work as the architect and development lead on the department's primary UI platform. This platform includes three major applications and several tools built on a core set of libraries.
Architected and developed an extremely configurable and extendable application development framework, with a focus on web application development. The FIS enterprise architecture team now recommends this framework for use by .NET applications throughout FIS.
Developed a build, deployment and testing process on top of Team Foundation Server and Windows Workflow Foundation that significantly enhanced the team's ability to deliver quality code more quickly in an automated way. This process is now being considered by the FIS enterprise release management team for use throughout FIS.
Play a primary role in defining an agile/scrum process and instructing the teams in the department on the methodology and implementation of the process.
Wrote the "Software Development Standards and Practices" for a company with no previous coding or documentation standards for developing software.
Designed and developed a web based contact manager for a company's sales representatives.
Designed and developed web applications to allow a company's customer service to easily track assets, modify contract data, and update part specifications.
Worked as team leader with a team in the MSOE Software Development Lab to continue and complete development on a course database and web interface for staff and student use.

Personal Achievements

Achieved the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America.
Achieved the rank of Black Belt in Martial Arts America.