Ethan Hicks

University of California, Berkeley

Senior Software Engineer

Building and operating high-volume commodities reporting systems for risk, regulatory, and third-party reporting workflows across cloud-hosted Java services.

• Develops and maintains Java microservices that generate commodities risk and regulatory reports for government-facing submissions and third-party stakeholders
• Owns SQL-backed trade ingestion and reporting workflows that import dozens of gigabytes of commodity trade data per day for downstream analytics and compliance use cases
• Operates resilient batch jobs and production APIs across AWS services including EC2, S3, Secrets Manager, and Step Functions state machines
• Stewards third-party vendor connectivity with Triple Point Software, supporting reliable commodity trade data exchange and reporting continuity
• Applies Claude and Gemini in daily engineering workflows to accelerate debugging, implementation planning, documentation, and code review readiness

Software Engineer II

Built fraud-resistant financial APIs at 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