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Jason Esser

I specialize in solving a wide variety of business needs by working with stakeholders to design and implement strategic, innovative, cost-effective, solutions.

I've designed and programmed systems ranging from retail software products to high transaction billing systems to medical device information systems.

Languages

C#
JavaScript
T-SQL


Methodologies

DevOps
Agile
SOA
TDD
PCI DSS


Outsourcing

Offshore development
Offshore remediations
Onshoring


Technologies

.NET
.NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin

Machine Learning
ML.NET

Web
ASP.NET Core MVC, Web API, SignalR, Web Services, REST, SOAP

Identity
OAuth, ASP.NET Identity, Crypto

ORM
Dapper, Entity Framework

Windows
WCF, WPF, WinForms

Devices
IoT

ALM / APM
Azure DevOps, TFS, Trac, Visual Studio, Application Insights, dynaTrace, New Relic


Azure Cloud Platform

Compute
Azure App Service
Azure Functions
Logic App Service

Storage
SQL Database
Blob Storage
Table Storage
ADF
Power BI

Messaging
Service Bus
Storage Queues

Identity
Azure AD
Key Vault

Network
Hybrid Cloud
Virtual Networks

Machine Learning
Cognitive Services
Azure Machine Learning


DarkOffice Technology Inc. 10/2012 - present

Work in a consulting capacity primarily as a hands-on developer. Many projects have required complex refactoring, remediations, and/or reverse engineering. Often asked to step into leadership or strategic consulting role after initial delivery.

New Product Development @ Fintech Company 12/2020 - 8/2023

Situation: My client was looking to develop a new cloud-native SaaS product to help their clients make faster, more accurate, lending decisions. They were also looking to add a SaaS revenue stream to their traditional T&M/Project work. I was responsible for the architecture and development of the solution.

Action: Worked with CTO, internal SMEs, and initial client to develop an entirely new lending product consisting of:
  • an automated loan scoring system using AI
  • an integration between the loan origination-system and the scoring system
  • a multi-tenant data warehouse
  • an ad-hoc end user reporting system covering sales pipeline through to loan performance over time
  • a zero-trust infrastructure designed to meet multiple audit and operational standards
Results:
  • Client was able to establish a SaaS revenue stream, build new partnerships within the ISV lending space, and develop several additional new AI products.
  • SaaS clients were able to leverage the knowledge gained from this new system to build larger credit pools.
  • Guesswork around loan origination was transformed into a decision system governed by machine learning.
  • 70% reduction in the timespan from initial loan application to deal being booked. 37% increase in deal volume with same staffing.

Situation: My client was partnered with large software provider which had an entire ecosystem of lending and leasing products. Many of the licensees also needed a portal for their end borrowers to see the current state of a loan/lease and take action on any delinquency. Large software vendor had been promising an improved portal for years but it had never materialized.

Action: Acted as PM, SE, and Developer to present a vision of portal which could be produced and replicated for many clients. Initial solution was developed and rolled out to initial customer in a period of 3 months. This was essentially a typical account management site for borrowers with the typical, view bill, pay bill, payment history, contact lender, exchange files, etc.

Results:
  • This established a third revenue stream for my client.
  • The rapid development and rollout of the product expanded the profile of my client into the leasing ISV space.
  • This product showed the dominant software provider that we had an appealing solution that they may be interested in acquiring to meet the longer-term demands of their licensees.

C# ASP.NET Core MVC ASP.NET Core Identity ML.NET Azure Functions Azure SQL Azure Machine Learning Azure Data Factory Power Automate Power BI

Application Development @ Medical Device Company 6/2018 - 5/2024

Situation: Company was having trouble re-writing verification software using a third-party contractor.

Action: I was able to work around the third-party contractor's issues by working directly with the original ISV to get the source code and then fix the issues with the original software.

Results:
  • Significantly increased the number of devices that could be delivered.
  • Significant cost savings realized by fixing existing software rather than re-writing an entire existing system.
  • Added value to the medical device.
  • Success of this initial project led to many subsequent projects with the client.
Projects:
  • Developed software to enhance an existing hardware design. Was able to extend device to have 5x the performance provided by the original manufacturer.
  • Designed and coded interface for new medical device being submitted to FDA. Developed Qualification documentation for submitted software.
  • Designed and built device provisioning system which tracked medical devices from manufacturing through supply chain to patient. This system was able to track medical devices while keeping PHI out of scope.
  • Designed and built medical device inspection system.
  • Designed and built medical device lot management system.

C# ASP.NET Core MVC WinForms WPF Dapper QMS Reverse Engineering Xamarin BLE 13485 Azure Functions Azure SQL Azure App Service Azure AD Azure DevOps Application Insights

Application Development and Mentoring @ Field Services Company 12/2018 - 12/2020

Situation: Client was a global IT service provider primarily focused on servicing large national retail brands. Company relied on a third-party scheduling system for day-to-day operations. This system was highly customized. I worked on extending this system via several key projects.

Projects:
  • Core product offering - Client offered an onsite service that was highly profitable but was unable to scale with customer demand. The product was a combination of hardware and software which required significant management and customization per client. I re-wrote this system to reduce the hardware cost and remove the need for per-client customization. My work reduced the typical onsite effort from 1-2 hours to as little as 20 minutes and created to a significant new revenue source during the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • Mobile App - Client relied on a third-party mobile app to track service visits. This app suffered an outage when a new version of iOS was released. This was a significant interruption to company operations. I re-wrote the application as a MVC app in a short period of time.
  • REST API project - Client had purchased costly third-party software to build "no-code" integrations with partners. This product didn’t work as expected. I designed and wrote a REST API for inbound communication and wrote a companion webhook service for sending outbound notifications to partners.
  • SMS project - Client needed to improve on-time arrival for technicians. I designed and implemented an SMS notification service which would alert techs of upcoming appointments and allow them to provide ETAs and status updates via SMS.
  • SQL Server remediation - Client experienced significant growth and began to have database scalability issues. I was able to identify and remediate a significant number of issues with SQL maintenance, stored procedures, and ad-hoc queries. This action removed the need to upgrade SQL Server.
Value adds:
  • Spent significant time mentoring other developers. Introduced client to cloud services, automated unit testing, CI/CD, and APM.

C# ASP.NET Core MVC Azure Functions Azure App Service Service Bus Azure DevOps Application Insights

Application Development @ Logistics Company 1/2016 - 11/2018
Situation: Company processing a combination of paper and electronic documents with:
  • a significant volume (~1 million documents per month — and increasing),
  • an infrastructure well beyond end-of-life (both OTS software and hardware past EoL),
  • a series of custom programs which had several traceability and reliability issues (electronic and scanned documents missing or discarded), and
  • a proprietary data storage backend.
Actions:
  1. Re-wrote document processing system to track all steps of document processing – regardless of paper or electronic paths.
  2. Built a flexible electronic image processing framework which took existing and new client onboarding from weeks to minutes.
  3. Migrated data storage to cloud.
Results:
  • Increased visibility into document processing.
  • Increased volume of document processing.
  • Faster onboarding of new clients.
  • Lower costs.
  • Established a path for removal of manual paper processing.

C# JavaScript Knockout Storage (Blob/Table/Queue) Hybrid cloud Azure DevOps Application Insights ASP.NET MVC Katana SQL Server Entity Framework

IoT SaaS Platform @ Hardware Development Company 6/2014 - 12/2015

Responsible for developing a new, multitenant, cloud-based "Internet of Things" platform to serve multiple vertical markets. This platform was developed as a new core business for the company and involved working directly with the VP of R&D, CTO, and CEO. Designed, coded, and deployed:

  • multitenant OAuth2, claims-based, identity system,
  • white-labelled, completely customizable, UI,
  • highly flexible, performant, and secure telemetry processing system,
  • real-time device telemetry and control via a responsive website,
  • "closed loop" command and control of IoT devices,
  • public-facing API server for partner integrations,
  • measurement, monitoring, and auditing frameworks for operations,
  • swappable billing backend

C# JavaScript App Service Virtual Machine Virtual Network Azure SQL Cosmos DB ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET Web API ASP.NET SignalR Autofac OWIN Katana MQTT AMQP New Relic SendGrid

Application Development & Stabilization @ HRM Company 7/2013 - 6/2014

Brought in to assist in onboarding a large client onto relatively new SaaS platform. Primary focus was on developing new features and fixing significant platform bugs.

  • Some key features added:
    • Designed and built user self-service provisioning.
    • Implemented a user retention mechanism to remove users from the system after certain events/timespans.
  • Key bugs fixed:
    • Refactored state management and caching mechanisms to be significantly more efficient. 30% performance improvement in key area of application.
    • Refactored two external vendor web service integrations.
    • Implemented exception tracking methodology to increase code and release quality.
  • Key strategic work done for stakeholders:
    • Performed and presented application functionality and performance gap assessment.
    • Drove migration from co-located application to Azure-native implementation. Significant cost reduction.
    • Worked with team leaders to hire new FTE development team.

C# JavaScript ASP.NET MVC WCF Entity Framework Mentoring DevOps

Application Development & Performance Improvement @ Incentive Company 12/2012 - 6/2013

  • Large SaaS in-sourcing project - Led and delivered critical in-sourcing effort to migrate customer off legacy platform. Significant monthly cost savings.
    • Designed and developed WCF governance engine to throttle customer participation in loyalty programs as well as to dynamically calculate customer reward pricing and eligibility.
    • Reverse-engineered and re-wrote existing set of web services without access to the source code.
    • Built custom Windows Workflow Rules Engine ruleset generator.
    • Completed project in 1/6 of the originally estimated time.
  • Code and platform optimization
    • Refactored multi-tenancy code to reduce number of web sites per client to one. This provided significant onboarding and operational savings.
    • Reduced SQL Server production utilization by 3 hours per day through code optimization. This saved the client tens of thousands in planned SQL server upgrade costs.
    • Cut cold web site startup time by over half.
    • Reduced web site server content payload size by 2/3.
    • Refactored logging across application to be faster and more flexible.
  • Team leadership
    • Introduced team to TDD and CI using TFS.
    • Drove effort to implement TFS 2012. Moved team from a customized Git implementation to TFS while maintaining ability to release on tight schedules.
    • Restructured large Visual Studio solution to allow for faster, more reliable, refactoring of codebase.

C# ASP.NET MVC WCF Windows Workflow Entity Framework API design TFS Load Testing Reverse Engineering

CLTS operated a cloud-based multitenant loyalty travel booking platform for major banks and credit card companies.  This SaaS platform was the 7th largest travel booking site on the internet and the #1 loyalty travel booking site.  CLTS was the top performing division of Affinion Group at the time.

Manager, Performance and Scalability

Established and led a team tasked with improving web site performance - reporting directly to the CTO.  Primary responsibilities were planning for business growth, improving both software and infrastructure reliability, as well as overall systems performance improvement.

  • Improved performance
    • Optimized application configuration to achieve 30% performance gain utilizing existing infrastructure. This improvement had the added benefit of increasing system capacity and stability.
  • Improved measurement
    • Identified and implemented new measurement tools and techniques aimed at proactively identifying performance issues during all phases of development and operations.
    • Designed and implemented portable, repeatable, load and capacity testing methodology.
  • Continual improvement
    • Work directly with third-party vendors and internal customers as well as external clients to identify, remediate, and prevent performance issues.
    • Prevented and remediated 3 significant production performance regressions in first 6 months.
    • Established code quality standards and SLAs with offshore development partner.
    • Identified and drove significant infrastructure stability improvements.

Managed Services PCI DSS Change Management E-commerce Operations WCF .NET Framework ASP.NET SQL Server TFS Code Profiling Load Testing dynaTrace DevOps

9/2008 - 6/2011

Lead Developer

Worked as the Lead Developer for a company specializing in cloud-based secure messaging solutions.  Solutions are marketed in both a SaaS model as well as on-premise solutions. SaaS solutions are hosted in a SAS70 Level 2 environment.  Prior to October 2008 DataMotion was named CertifiedMail.com, Inc.

  • Solutions delivery
    • Led effort to redesign and rebuild core codebase.
    • Designed and implemented new payment processing and subscription management system.
    • Designed and implemented new 3rd party provisioning API.
    • Designed and implemented mobile version of SecureMail product.
  • Team leadership
    • Collated ten years of systems documentation and fourteen years of systems development into a two day training course suitable for use outside of Engineering.
    • Mentored developers via pair programming as well as via code reviews.
  • Improved measurement
    • Designed and implemented a significantly improved message auditing framework.
    • Designed and implemented application usage measurement methodology.
  • Continual Improvement
    • Initiated and led several efforts to increase system performance and reliability of legacy code base.
    • Initiated and led several efforts to identify and eliminate obsolete features and dead code.

C# VB.NET ASP.NET ASP.NET MVC jQuery Mobile SQL Server Authorize.net TFS

8/2007 - 9/2008

Software Engineer

Worked in a research and development capacity to develop new functionalities for new and existing enterprise planning software. This included analyzing, specifying and programming new functionalities.  ILOG has since been purchased by IBM.

  • Worked primarily on web-based supply chain analysis and optimization product ILOG Inventory and Product Flow Analyst.
  • Developed significant new functionality that automated and streamlined much of the user input, reporting, and supply chain optimization process. The tool was essentially a wizard that walked a user through the analysis and optimization process. With this enhancement users needed 70% less training. Likewise, this tool reduced user data input requirements by 75%.
  • Led effort to improve architecture and performance of several elements of the supply chain analysis application and several of its supporting technologies.
  • Served as lead developer for innovative reporting solutions utilizing Tableau.

C# VB.NET ASP.NET ASP.NET AJAX SQL Server WinForms

Systems Developer

Worked in a consulting role with a variety of companies to build custom applications to meet a variety of needs. Typical roles included supplemental staffing (application analysis, design, and programming), technical project leadership, and mentoring.

  • Built ASPXAuth authentication and authorization application for IIS-based web sites. This application enabled web sites to easily set up and manage user access to their content based on roles and/or user authorization. I built this application for ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0 using both VB.NET and C#. This application used SQL Server 2000 or 2005 for data storage and also made extensive use of custom HTTP Modules, HTTP Handlers, .NET custom controls and Cryptography.
  • Worked as a contract programmer for CenterPoint Energy. I was directly responsible for first stabilizing their online customer account management web site and then re-writing it from the ground up. This system enables their three million customers to manage their account and pay their bills over the internet. The system itself was built using ASP, MQSeries, DB2, Oracle, and a Novell eDirectory (LDAP) server. I was the primary programmer for the web server code, the interfaces into MQSeries, the queries into Oracle, and the user authorization against eDirectory. This system can be seen at CenterPoint Energy My Account Online .
  • Mentored and trained the development staff of CenterPoint Energy to support and utilize internet technologies. This knowledge transfer enabled the company to have a more robust infrastructure while becoming less dependent on outside resources.
  • Built reddiggulo.us. This site took the most popular news from social bookmarking sites, identified unique stories, and ranked them against each other using a proprietary popularity algorithm. I built this site with C#, ASP.NET, and SQL Server 2005.
  • Built a custom ordering website for the wholesale business and a CD-ROM version of their wholesale catalog which has enabled customers to cut down on paper as well as get pictures of the various products and plants while in the field.
  • Worked with a Corporate Payments division in US Bank to translate a set of EDI standards to XML.

https://www.lightoffice.com/jason/