Ethan Hicks

University of California, Berkeley

Software Engineer II

Currently building fraud-resistant financial APIs that handle massive scale, while leading architectural improvements and mentoring junior developers.

• Implements the Financial Data Exchange API standard, a user consent and permissions based financial API dealing with sensitive transactions information, with fraud-resistant systems in mind
• Designed and scaled a REST-based microservices platform handling 1.5 billion monthly requests with high reliability and low latency
• Led transition from a monolithic codebase to a Spring-based microservices architecture, cutting server costs by 50%
• Developed Kafka-based web-hook notification infrastructure to inform clients about consenting operations, reducing API polling loads on servers by 100%
• Integrated Redis-based caching mechanisms for frequent repeated REST calls, saving up to 100 milliseconds per call, resulting in thousands of dollars saved in compute costs, and better customer response times
• Automated Jenkins-based QA and Production CI/CD pipelines, resulting in 30+ minute faster deployment times, saving engineering headaches, and reducing time to resolution for rare production incidents
• Championed engineering mentorship and guided 4 interns every summer, showing them how to write and maintain production level code, more advanced features of git and linux, and facilitating a learning environment

Java Backend Engineer

Helped a growing startup expand their customer base 4x by building intelligent support operations software and optimizing data pipelines for AI-driven insights.

• Created customer support operations software that increased startup customers from 2 to 8+ within a year
• Reduced customer operation times by 30% by implementing a customizable support operation scoring system
• Extracted and cleaned customer data and metadata in SQL from user behavior for machine learning team, directly increasing model training data by 50%, resulting in better AI predictions for CRM to customer interactions

Full Stack Engineer

Built innovative video conferencing experiences during the early pandemic, focusing on performance optimization and user engagement to drive initial product sales.

• Developed AWS EC2 instances running Node.js and Python to reduce client-side computing requirements by over 50%
• Built interactive frontend experiences with WebRTC, React and PixiJS for a real-time video conferencing product
• Extracted user insights to drive product-market fit for hosts in niche verticals, leading to first product sales