Babak Naffas
Visa Status United States Citizen
Excellent English communications skills; fluent in Farsi; some Spanish and Hebrew
Career Summary
Principal Software Engineer with two decades of experience bridging product vision and engineering delivery. Skilled in architecting scalable, testable systems, championing CI/CD practices, and leading cross-functional teams through all phases of the SDLC.
Cloud Platforms - AWS, Azure
Databases – MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, ElasticSearch
Build Automation - Jenkins, codefresh, GitHub Workflows
Unit Testing – MSTest, xUnit, mocha, jest
Bug Tracking – GitHub, Trac, Mingle, JIRA
Web Tools - Chrome Developer Tools, Firebug, Postman, curl
APM and Logging – Datadog, Kibana, ELK Stack
Experience
Endpoint (First American) | El Segundo, CA
Principal Software Engineer (December 2020 – Present)
- Work with engineering managers and product owners to breakdown product requirements into domains & micro services. Documenting technical requirements and how they relate to functional requirements. Regular meetings with product designers, product owners, and other team leads reduced overall engineering cost
- Coordinated between internal SRE and Datadog sales engineers to integrate APM capabilities into our deployed systems. Monitoring and observability improvements reduced MTTI by 80% and MTTR by 50%.
Spending 25% of my time doing IC work; Integrating AI tools has allowed me to double my throughput
- Architected system requirements based on product roadmap forecasts, preemptively mitigating backend technical debt and reducing overall engineering costs by 25%
Fandango | Beverly Hills, CA
Systems Architect (March 2018 – Dec 2020)
- Systems and feature documentation and review to identify feature use, legacy/dead code and systems, and performance optimizations with a focus on availability, performance, and scalability.
- Working with product teams providing design and architecture reviews and recommendations in preparation for implementations.
Staff Software Engineer (April 2016 – March 2018)
- Designed and executed production-scale load tests (jMeter + jmeter-ec2), enabling near-zero downtime during high-traffic spikes and reducing testing costs by 90% vs. commercial tools. Logging improvements and APM dashboards correlated with load-testing feedback with system dashboards and metrics to identify bottlenecks and improvements.
- Reviewing AWS environments and tuning for cost while maintaining high availability and fault tolerance.
- Interviewing candidates for Software Engineering and Systems Reliability Engineer positions
- Managing a portfolio of internal and public facing websites and RESTful services. Responsible for feature development, bug fixes, performance tracking, reliability, and DevOps.
- Managing public APIs via Mashery and Akamai and onboarding new 3rd party integrations
- Lead efforts migrating monolithic, datacenter-hosted web applications to cloud hosted architecture in AWS
- Application Performance Management (APM) for applications deployed across data centers and the cloud using AppDynamics. Responsible for managing permissions, rollouts, and configurations to provide optimal real-time data across our apps, data centers, and architectures.
- Architected, implemented, and maintained a variety of applications as they were migrated from data center hosting to the AWS cloud. PowerShell and the AWS SDK were used to automate the release process
Senior Systems Developer (December 2012 – April 2016)
- Introduced an AWS hosted NuGet repository to manage packages as they were decoupled from monolithic solutions. https://github.com/NuGet/NuGetGallery was forked and modified to use AWS S3 for package storage. This was a precursor to maturing our development efforts as shared projects were replaced with Nuget packages instead of shared code.
- Architected and lead a team to migrate an externally developed site with 30MM monthly visitors to an in-house ASP.NET MVC implementation deployed to AWS able to handle daily traffic spikes and quick deployment cycles.
- DevOps automations work reduced 4 man-day release processes to 45 minutes with reduced error- and rollback-rates.
- Improved software quality reduced ongoing error rate from 3% to 0.1% and allowed for speed improvements that increase conversion rate by 10%.
- Worked with a team of engineers in breaking single monolithic solutions into decoupled, service oriented solutions to facilitate separate deployment and development schedules
- Mentoring interns and junior engineers throughout development of production-ready deliverables and software development practices
Bitsoft Consulting | Los Angeles, CA
Principal (2007 – 2015)
- Freelance and side projects implemented in a variety of platforms from static websites, proof of concepts, to SEO efforts. Replaced static HTML heavenly-dental.com with WordPress for improved content management; Structured schema changes and SEO cleanup allowed for 50% improved web traffic. Replaced pewaves.com Yahoo! Stores with a custom e-commerce site and CMS integrated with Google Checkout. Search engine optimizations doubled site impressions and sales.
- Custom web reporting tool querying against FileMaker, Exchange 2003 WebDAV (ported to Exchange 2010 Web Services), SharePoint, and 3rd party providers to identify mismatched data and facilitate data cleaning.
- Designed, architected, developed, and deployed vacashare.com to Windows Azure
- On-demand Azure Storage backed image resizing service for managing photo content
- Map based search for photos automatically organized into trips using EXIF metadata
Senior Software Engineer (April 2012 – November 2012)
- Lead the engineering team in architecting a common platform around legacy systems to allow smoother integration of new requirements and infrastructure with extensive code reviews and refactoring of legacy code reducing reported errors by 50%
- Mentoring and code reviews for associate/junior software engineers and off-shore resources
- R&D for proposed system integrations looking into architecture, capabilities, data accessibility, and scalability. Integrated OpenGraph tags into a multi-site architecture to help keep up with search engine changes.
Lieberman Research Worldwide | Century City, CA
Senior Software Engineer (August 2008 – April 2012)
- Full software development life cycle responsibilities: analyzing business requirements and use cases, design and architecture, integration, deployment, and client support. Also worked with PMO to determine estimates and timelines.
- Mentoring junior developers introducing design patterns (MVC, Singletons, Subscribers), best practices for development, refactoring techniques, unit testing, and web technologies.
- Managing joint off-shore and local team of developers and consultants – coordinating efforts between developers, product owners, QA staff, and interns for final development and on-time release online reporting tools developed using the Microsoft/.NET stack and 3rd party components
- Introduced continuous integration processes that provided single click deployments to QA, Stage, and Production environments. This effort reduced most deployment issues.
- Performed performance and load testing on new and legacy projects using WebLoad, Perfmon, and SQL Management Studio to identify performance bottle necks
- Earned company awards in January 2009, September 2010, and January 2011 for projects resulting in new research capabilities for the company including the company’s first UX driven market research survey and integrating a 3rd party sample provider API, ASP.NET reporting front-end, and data collection engine for the company’s first diary-research study
IT Strategists | Los Angeles, CA
Software Engineer & Consultant (May 2006 – August 2008)
- Implemented and managed the company’s first DevOps/CI capabilities; implemented a continuous integration environment built on Cruise Control .NET, Nant, Subversion, and NUnit unit tests across environments
- Custom software implementation across desktop and web platforms. Projects implemented using the .NET framework and SQL Server deployed to Windows Server running IIS and SharePoint.
- Performed requirements analysis, system design, and data modeling on a variety of projects implemented using the .NET Framework & Microsoft stack. Profiled application stacks using ANTS profiler and MS SQL Server profiler to identify performance bottlenecks and improve performance
DISCover Console | Long Beach, CA
Software Engineer March (2006 – May 2006)
Net GINI | Los Angeles, CA
Junior Network Technician (March 2005 – Feb 2006)
Lantronix | Irvine, CA
Software Engineer Intern (May 2004 – August 2004)
- Implemented nUnit tests validating internal .NET Framework implementation
WARPG | Cost Mesa, CA
Game Developer & Team Lead (June 2002 – June 2004)
Beckman Laser Institute | Irvine, CA
Resident Programmer / Undergraduate Researcher (April 2001 – June 2004)
- Designed and Implemented software for Real-Time Data Acquisition and Analysis system using National Instruments CVI / LabWindows running on in-house built medical device. The project was presented at a talk as part Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program fellowship
Organizations and Memberships
| Toastmasters International |
International Jinenkan – Shodan/Black-belt |
Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity |
Magbit Young Professionals, Secretary (2007, 2008), Vice President (2009) |
Education
- 2004 - 2006 Loyola Marymount University (Computer Science)
- 1999 – 2004 University of California, Irvine (Information and Computer Science)