Profile

10+ years of technical experience ranging from big data machine learning, creating population health monitoring devices, building distributed virtualization appliances, programming advanced network protocols, creating virtual worlds and implementing novel artificial intelligence techniques. 6+ years of experience of technical leadership from team lead to senior management.

Skills

Software Engineering

Ability to analyze software specification in order to choose design patterns which ensure a systematic development process of a robust piece of software.

Pragmatic Best Practices

Experienced with design and implementation of large scale distributed systems. Always focused on the "ity's" - scalability, security, stability, maintainability, and extensibility.

Operational Focus

Continually focused on improving feedback loops and skillsets, removing constraints, exploiting strengths and advantages. Improving software development through retrospectives, post-mortems and analytics.

Technical

  • IOS & Android
  • Graph DB (Tinkerpop, Neo4J)
  • NoSQL (MongoDB, Riak, Redis)
  • Containerization (k8s, helm)
  • Cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • git, svn, cvs
  • Java, C#
  • Node js
  • Linux, Unix, OSX, Windows

Experience

Big Fish Games

Technical Lead

09/2021-Present

Technical Lead of Solutions Reliability Team (SRE). Responsible for ensuring detection of degraded performance, outages and partial outages of game portfolio. Worked closely with game development teams to ensure availability, stabilitiy and reliability of systems moving to the cloud. Migrated monitoring and alerting of legacy systems from Nagios to New Relic. Built cloud infrastructure to support bespoke monitoring solutions in GCP. Develop and maintain terraform modules to create common monitoring infrastructure for engineering teams across the Aristocrat organization. Agile leader - lead sprint planning, stand ups, long-term roadmaps and quarterly planning. Worked closely with the following technologies: New Relic, Google Cloud Platform, Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, Harness, Jenkins, Team City, Github Actions, GCP Cloud Build.

Shutterfly Inc.

Principal Engineer

10/2018-09/2021

Technical Lead of brand-wide initiative to increase user engagement. Team leader for Snapfish experimental feature team. Responsible for developing new product capabilities such as: single sign-on, advanced metadata extraction, product recommendation, facial clustering and search. Responsible for providing architectural guidance for development of new technical capabilities such as: migration of VM-based services to containers using Kubernetes, Kafka integration, Graph databases (Neo4J, Janusgraph), integration of Spring Boot into development ecosystem, and hybrid cloud migration. Leader of Engeering training for AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification. Implemented APIs with Java and Spring Boot. Worked closely with the following technologies: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, AWS (ec2, eks, lambda), Terraform, Packer, Janusgraph, Neo4J, Apache Tinkerpop, Gremlin, ScyllaDB, Kafka, MongoDB, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana.

Portalarium

Senior Programmer

10/2017-07/2018

Worked on the Massively Multiplayer Online PC game: Lord British's Shroud of the Avatar. Responsible for maintenance, scaling and monitoring of web servers, log-in servers and game server firewalls. Implemented features such as the in-game and online map systems, Custom Heraldry building website and the eCommerce platform using: Unity, php, node.js, python, leaflet.js, vue.js. Worked closely with the following technologies: ECS, MariaDB, docker, HAProxy, TeamCity, Elastic Stack, AWS lambda.

Health Recovery Solutions

VP of Engineering

11/2015-10/2017

Grew development team from 3 to 15. Worked with team to implement agile development methodologies, created QA team, created build pipeline, implemented CI/CD for multiple projects. Responsible for design and architecture of product, integrations with hospitals, security, HIPAA compliance, development team managemet, and server architecture. Designed and implemented features using: php, java, bash, node.js, bash, coffeescript. Worked closely with the following technologies: apache, docker, ecr/ecs, nginx, socket.io, openswan/IPSEC, android, cordova

Nimboxx

Lead Software Engineer

05/2013-11/2015

SCRUM team leader. Git branch maintainer. Responsible for software design and implementation of features such as: VM cloning and migration, high availaibility, support tunnel, distributed storage and cluster membership join / removal. Implemented features in php, c, python, and bash. Worked closely with following technologies: apache, openssl, riak, libvirt, kvm/qemu, collectd, corosync, pacemaker, sheepdog.

Texture Media Inc.

Senior Software Developer

06/2011-05/2013

Responsible for architecture and implementation of new features on multiple PHP web applications on a LAMP stack; application frameworks include: Yii, Cakephp, Wordpress, Vbulletin, and Lemonstand. Responsible for oversight of network security of web servers and applications. Migrated multiple applications from static hosting service to AWS and responsible for performance and maintenance of cloud servers. Use AWS API for scripts to deploy and scale web application servers. Employ machine learning techniques to implement a recommendation engine for users that is driven by the contents' subject, and the behavior of other users.

Sole Proprietorship - Freelance Developer

2010-2011

University of Texas

Created a full featured online course for the University of Texas Chemistry department. Used PHP with Codeigniter framework and MySQL database.

Long Island Taxi

Created an online cashiering web application for a livery taxi company in Long Island, NY

Google Summer of Code

Software Developer

2009-2010

2010

Contributed the Hidden Services feature to Java implementation of the Tor protocol (JTor).

2009

Developed multiple features for the Torbutton Firefox extension, including an HTTP header spoofer and a feature for selectively choosing cookies to use while browsing anonymously.

Graduate Assistant and Research Assistant

Villanova University

2008-2010

Research Assistant for Data Mining with Machine Learning graduate level course. Graduate teaching assistant for three Java based Algorithms and Data Structures classes and Ethics in computing class. Computer Science general tutor for 20 hours a week – included debugging programs in C, C++, Python, Ruby, Javascript, and Java. Worked with Dr. Mirela Damian on analyzing properties of ad hoc networks connected with various algorithms. Supported by NSF grant CCF-0728909; Presented findings at 2008 national Sigma Xi research conference[1].

Education

Master of Science in Computer Science

Villanova University - Spring 2010

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Villanova University - Spring 2009

Other

US Amateur Radio License

Technician Class - Callsign: K0RYK

Bibliography

[1] Kirk, Kory E. "Sigma Xi Scientific Research Abstracts" (2008):134. Presented at Sigma Xi Annual Meeting and Research Conference. http://www.sigmaxi.org/meetings/archive/abstracts2008.pdf

[2] Kirk, Kory E. Genetic Algorithms and an Exploration of the Genetic Wavelet Algorithm. Villanova University. Ann Arbour: ProQuest, 2010.

Kory Kirk — kory@korykirk.com