Summary

Chris Roberts comes with 24 years of object-oriented software development and methodologies. He has been a hands-on lead architect, designer and developer on a number of applications across various industries including government, financial, telephony, insurance, and apparel. He is capable of carrying out a full system design throughout an application’s full life-cycle. His technical expertise centers mainly on the J2SE & J2EE platforms, the Spring framework, agile development processes, iterative development methodologies and artificial intelligence. In his engagements as an architect, he knows that outlining a high-quality software architecture comes not only from deriving a set of solutions based on customer requirements, but also from discovering problems that may not have been initially noticed. He has the ability to identify and mitigate architectural risks early in the project life-cycle.
He has presented at major events and has published articles in well known forums. Employing the skills he acquired in artificial intelligence, he and his Sun colleague successfully gave a Java One Technical Session in 2000 on A Rules Engine Integration Architecture for the Enterprise”. He went on to publish material on rules engines in JavaReport and later teamed up with ILog experts to publish another article in JDJ (Java Developer’s Journal). In 2001 he participated in the RuleML initiative-a group that establishes open standards for Rules Engines and the Semantic Web. In 2002, he again delivered a Java One Technical Session on Avoiding Exception Fumbling” with his Sun colleagues.

Specialties

• Java/J2EE Platforms as an architect, team lead, and developer
• RESTful Services
• Agile (Certified Scrum Master)
• Enterprise Messaging (RabbitMQ, TIBCO, IBM MQ Series)
• Spring, Hibernate
• Business Rules Engines & Artificial Intelligence

Professional Experience

Application Architect
Confidential (June 2011-Present)
In this contracting role, I’m part of Team Disney’s Architecture group where I’m developing a RESTful web services reference implementation, advise project teams on tactical and strategic architecture solutions, and leading an effort to develop a multiyear road map for their enterprise data management and content management system team.

Technical Architect
Confidential (March 2011-June 2011)
In this capacity I was an independent contractor in the Orlando area assisting various hospitality and entertainment companies develop SOA strategies, implement RESTful services solutions, led and mentored their staff in Java/J2EE platforms and Agile and Scrum.

Sr Programmer/Analyst
Confidential (August 2010 – March 2011)
Development of software infrastructure using web services and messaging to interact with affiliated marketing agencies, loyalty systems, and major websites from the ground up using Scrum. In my role as a lead developer and Scrum Master of a 3 person team, I designed and developed a Java-based Digital Gateway system in whose responsibility is to distribute company content (digital offerings and coupons) to our external partners. I used J2SE, RabbitMQ, the Spring framework and Oracle. I also helped to stand up the company’s first centralized internal binary repository which holds all software distributions we publish and all consumable 3rd party software artifacts.

Vice President
Confidential (Aug 2008 – August 2010) 
Solutions Architect for Product Servicing (an area of Treasury & Securities Services). In my role I focused on the end-to-end solution by meeting routinely with business and technology, planned the total solution, design the conceptual architecture and validate the physical architecture.

Associate Director
Confidential NY, NY (Sep 2007 – Aug 2008)
Developed applications for the top precious metals trader on Wall Street whose average trading volume can exceed $500 million per day. Responsible for employing engineering best practices using Agile development processes, automated builds, releases, object oriented design & development for the Global Metals Desk of Bear Stearns. Most notably, I developed a highly scalable multithreaded trading system whose main responsibility is to coalesce trades for maximum execution performance. I used J2SE, ESB (Tibco EMS) under JMS, the Spring framework and Sybase most of which was developed using Scrum. Administered project websites in our area used by our traders to find technical support, economic calendars & used by our internal team as a common portal for project information.

Senior Manager and Applications Developer Lead
Confidential NY, NY (Oct 2005 – Aug 2007)
Client: JP Morgan Chase, Wall Street
Developed an FX leave order system application using The Spring Framework, Open source from Jakarta Commons, and JMS (Sonic MQ). This client-server Java-based application supported 500+ global concurrent users and had to be up 24x5. Client side was written in Eclipse SWT and communicated to server side via Sonic MQ JMS.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position include:

• Developing server-side Java services for the Order Market Intelligence (OMI) system
• Integrating a new Market Data Server into OMI (Java)
• Standing up and maintaining Production and Disaster Recovery sites (Java, shell scripting)
• Training Level 2 operates on how to maintain OMI and creating an OMI Run book
• Setting up cluster failover for JMS brokers (Sonic MQ, Java)
• Augmenting build, test, and release processes (Maven, shell scripting)

Client: Confidential Wall Street
Developed an eTrading application using Tibco Rendezvous messaging software. The application was written using Java Server side technology and Win Forms C# 2.0(VS .Net 2005) on the client side. The application was implemented using Agile and TDD. Responsible for Java services development, configuration management, metrics gathering, automated testing frameworks and calibration.
Client: Fairchild Publications, Midtown
Brides.com is the online presence for Brides magazine-a Conde Nast Publication. Designed and implemented the system for local vendor listings on brides.com. The system allows vendors to purchase and schedule advertisement space in their local area and users of the site can select a location of interest and see only ads for this area. At the core of the system, we developed a Placement Engine which processes a vendor listing with price, schedule information and quickly retrieves and places specific listings for any localized advertisement space on the website. Some tools and frameworks which we used were J2EE, The Spring Framework, Hibernate, IBM Websphere 6, and Oracle 10.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position include:

• Leading a team of 4 to deliver a portion of the website and admin tools.
• Delivering incremental software releases as the Scrum Master
• Designing and implementing along with the rest of the brides.com team.

Senior Java Architect Confidential 
Confidential New York, NY (Feb 1998 – Sep 2005)
Consulted customers on architecture and pattern driven solutions executed in over 15 different projects of which a few are listed below: 

Client: Confidential 
Lead Architect and Mentor responsible for delivering a high-profile J2EE-based application (COURTS) using Struts as the presentation framework and Hibernate for persistence. COURTS manages cases for the state’s Department of Worker’s Compensations and involves 150+ use cases and a team of 20 resources. 
Client: Lockheed Martin and Gunter Air force Base
Implemented, tested and deployed a security service using J2SE and JNDI called User Data Web Service (UDWS). UDWS supports a growing number of applications and had to support 300 concurrent sessions and 6 million transactions per month. The service is used to retrieve user credentials and data for performing authorization. 

Client: Confidential Wall Street
Marketing Liaison Architect for Blueshift\'s SRT (development group) in response to Citibank\'s New Customer Acquisitions group. Provided technical continuity between new requirements from the marketing group and SRT. Accompanied marketing personnel on product evaluation trips to determine technology and feasibility of product with respect to citi.com. Initiated proposal requests from marketing group to SRT.

Client: Confidential
Performed (assistant) Technical Management responsibilities including solving major technical risks. Promoted and executed a code review & refactoring process whereby each developer submitted their components with a "form" filled out. A team of peers and an architect would then perform an hour long code review and refactoring efforts would be appropriated. Also designed and developed jcrew.com\'s first search engine. Helped to perform project planning tasks along-side J. Crew staff and Fort Point counterparts.

Client: Confidential
Lead Architect on a Web-enabled series of CORBA based applications during the elaboration phase of their project. Helped to identify and define architecturally significant use cases. Designed and developed a component integration framework where components could be introduced at deploy-and run-time using configuration files using XML. Created integration framework for CORBA components and helped to design Servlet client framework for their presentation layer.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position include:

• Establishing and cultivating customer relationships
• Demonstrating exceptional expertise on the Java platform
• Supporting and managing development projects in any part of the life-cycle

Infrastructure Architect 
Confidential Tampa, FL (Jun 1996 – Jan 1998)
Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position include:

• Consulting customers on modeling application infrastructure solution
• Leading development projects in this capacity, I executed in 3 different projects including:

Client: USAA, San Antonio, Texas 
Hands-on coding and customer interfacing. Developed application infrastructure based on CORBA and C++. Led a team to demonstrate how a business rules engine could quickly and intelligently solve problems for USAA (insurance for military personnel). 
In-house Development
Created pluggable inference engine architecture to allow different types of rules engines implementations (including ILOG JRules) to be accessed by many applications without rewriting code.
Client: Entenmann\'s (In-house)
Performed data mining activities to help Entenmann\'s supply chain management to discover demographic trends and help them to optimize their inventory using Prolog and Java.

Senior Designer/Developer 
Confidential Tampa FL (Dec 1995 – Apr 1996)
Developed an event-driven application called the National Order Collection system. Created a state engine and navigation rules to transition the application’s state using CLIPS rule-based expert system and C++.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position included:

• Developing telecommunications-based applications.

Senior Designer/Developer 
Confidential Tampa, FL (Oct. 1995 – Dec.1995)
Designed and implemented an authentication and authorization Security Service for several cooperating applications with administrative interfaces for managing users, roles, and groups. Supported a nationally used expert system application based on ART* Enterprise and C++ during peak season.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position included:

• Hands-on development of a Security Service.

Senior Designer/Developer 
Confidential Tampa, FL (May 1995 – Oct 1995)
Led a team of five software engineers to produce a proof-of-concept of a large enterprise infrastructure based on DCE/IDL and C++. Evaluated over twenty infrastructure products and managed project schedules and demos for the customer. Implemented a client/server architecture on which 80% of all clients and servers applications were based. Created a code generator to produce the beginnings of client and server instances to increase productivity and reduce human coding errors. Advised and trained application rules team in rule-based expert technologies using CLIPS as an implementation.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position included:

• Leading proof-of-concept project
• Developing code generation tools
• Advising and mentoring on rules engines

Software Engineer 
Confidential Tampa, FL (Feb 1995 – Apr 1995)
Implemented a large portion of a semi-automated regression testing tool using C++ and Korn/Bourne/C shell scripting to test various subsystems. Provided support for UAT (User Acceptance Test) activities for the GTE API/Multiple Transport facility and aided in preparing the test reports of all testing activities.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position included:

• Developing test automation framework
• Supporting testing activities

Designer/Developer 
Confidential Tampa FL (Nov 1995 – Jan 1995)
Implemented a rules validation and translation environment for telecommunications applications in C/C++. Built a menu-driven interface to perform syntactic and consistency checking of rules for deployed applications. 
Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position included:

• Developing data validation and transformation environment
• Supporting customers in requirements gathering and review

Technical Instructor 
Confidential Tampa, FL (Jan 1994 – Oct 1994)
Developed and taught classes in C and UNIX fundamentals, advanced topics, system internals, and system administration to local companies and universities. Managed other technical instructors to expand course curriculum. Initiated and taught mutual training programs for technical and management staff.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position included:

• Technical training and presenting to customers and universities
• Managing a team of technical instructors
  

Designer/Developer 
Confidential Tampa, FL (Feb 92 – Jan 1994)
Designed, tested, and maintained data manipulators for the back end of the Customer Marketing and Service System (CMSS) application that updated and retrieved information from a UNIX Informix database. Created code generation tools to produce faster, more reliable software in C/C++ and Korn/Bourne/C-Shell. Developed and maintained server drivers to manage database manipulation as a member of the server team group. As a member of configuration management team, wrote top-level version control shell scripts and performed system integration and production testing activities.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position included:

• Developing data access methods for a back end application
• Supporting customers in requirements gathering and review
• Performing configuration management tasks

Research Member 
Confidential Webster, NY (May 1991 – Aug 1991)
Developed a high-level document reconstruction programming environment in LISP and CLOS. Researched, defined, and successfully developed a document reconstruction environment to extract a set of descriptive structures from original documents. Devised transformation algorithms using advanced artificial intelligence techniques and tools.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position included:

• Developing artificial intelligence solutions
• Researching document imaging and recognition

Research Assistant 
Confidential Tampa, FL (1990 – 1991)
Constructed and refined verification and validation process for rule-based expert system methodologies for a Honeywell-funded research project. Designed and evaluated a validation tool in LISP and CLOS to support the rule-based maintenance process.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position included:

• Developing validation tools for rules engines
• Researching how to better verify and validate a rules engines system.

Software Engineer 
Confidential Clearwater, FL (1987 – 1990)
Developed and supported and released several versions of a critical interface software system to the Space Shuttle’s Main Engine Controller in C, M68000 Assembly, ADA, PASCAL, and BASIC. Wrote test software to perform tests on the controller and developed and performed training tasks on a number of other in-house software tools.

Major Responsibilities and day-to-day activities in this position included:

• Working with hardware to support Space Shuttle components
• Developing interfaces for performing tests on Shuttle components
• Training and mentoring of staff

Education

• Ph. D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) – Not Complete
• Minor in Cognitive Psychology
• Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering
• Minor in Computer Engineering

Certifications and Publications

• Certified Scrum Master, December 2005
• Avoiding Exception Fumbling”, JavaOne 2002 Technical Session.
• A Rules Engine Integration Architecture for the Enterprise”, JavaReport article, July 2000.
• A Rules Engine Integration Architecture for the Enterprise”, JavaOne 2000 Technical Session
• Implementing Business Rules in Java”, Java Developers Journal article, May 2000