Nikole Dunixi
Technical Lead · Senior Software Engineer
10+ years of professional development experience. Specialized in building distributed systems, microservices, and cloud architectures.
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About
I'm seeking Staff Engineer or other technical leadership roles where my architectural depth and leadership experience with leading teams, driving hiring, and shaping engineering culture will have the greatest impact.
I'm a Tech Lead and Senior Software Engineer with over a decade of experience building scalable, distributed systems. I hold two Bachelor's of Science degrees, one in Computer Science and the other in Game Art. I have earned multiple AWS certifications. My expertise is in building Docker and Kubernetes-based microservices, primarily in Java and GoLang.
For the past two-plus years as Technical Lead, my role has grown to span both engineering and management. On the technical side I mentor developers, architect systems, and set engineering standards. On the people side I've been a key voice in hiring, managed performance concerns up to and including termination, and heavily shaped the annual team roadmap. I've also consistently facilitated Sprint Planning, Grooming, and Retrospectives. Along the way I've eliminated production outages. I delivered complex features such as the event-driven customer rewards engine, which drove a 50% reduction in customer attrition.
I enjoy working on hard problems. I'm equally comfortable with serverless architectures and traditional compute models. In my spare time I dig into new technologies and share what I learn with my coworkers and the broader community.
Experience
Software Technical Lead
Quick Quack Car Wash · January 2024 - Present
- Educated Junior and Middle level developers in Golang, API, GraphQL, and Distributed Systems Architecture best practices
- Architected linearized event driven system for accessing Stripe subscription data to reduce API usage
- Defined and provided architecture standards with project templates
- Eliminated production outages with standardized deployment procedures
- Designed and delivered an event-driven customer rewards engine that reduced customer attrition by 50%
- Optimized codebase with effective use of Go's standard library
- Improved developer experience by standardizing the build system across projects
Senior Software Engineer
WorldWinner · December 2022 - January 2024
- Created GoLang/SQS event-driven architecture to deliver customer-facing features (AWS Lambda/AWS Fargate/Kubernetes)
- Migrated legacy systems from Perl/Java to Golang and Python (Monolith to Microservices)
- Implemented custom React Typescript with Unity 3D Game Engine integration for business needs
- Utilized NextJS with SSR to implement modern UI as a Backend for Frontend (BFF) pattern
- Executed effective deployment plans to recover from production outages
Senior Software Engineer
American Family Insurance · March 2021 - December 2022
- Conceptualized, designed, and delivered a GoLang OIDC product
- Introduced GoLang for Web Application Development and Developer Tooling
- Operated a Center of Excellence in GCP
- Created organization standards for Web Application Development and CI/CD
- Held regular office hours for developers and business users
Software Engineer
Forcepoint · August 2019 - March 2021
- Built microservices in Java (Dropwizard), C# (EmbedIO), and GoLang
- Deployed microservices to EC2, ECS, and Kubernetes
- Developed new technologies and improved legacy customer-facing products
- Created AWS infrastructure meeting challenging business requirements while adhering to AWS best practices
- Established an efficient CI/CD process integrating AWS CloudFormation and HashiCorp Terraform
Senior Software Engineer
Western Governors University · January 2017 - August 2019
- Created new applications for students and employees using Java/SpringBoot
- Successfully migrated legacy systems (6-7+ years old JSP Servlets) to modern, cloud-focused architectures using Dockerized microservices on ECS Fargate
- Established the CI/CD process at WGU for building and delivering stacks with CodeBuild and CloudFormation
- Facilitated the transition from dedicated on-premise servers to Docker containers in Serverless Fargate Clusters within ECS
- Introduced GoLang for CI/CD and Developer Tooling
Contracted Software Development Engineer in Test
TEKsystems (Krames StayWell LLC) · May 2016 - January 2017
- Migrated client's Web UI automation from Telerik to Selenium
- Created a custom Selenium WebDriver to support Telerik-written tests
- Enabled clients to maintain their legacy test suite while utilizing Selenium's features and standards
Software Development Engineer in Test
Overstock.com · April 2012 - May 2016
- Identified manual inefficiencies in the call center and built automation to eliminate them, leading to a transition into the QA engineering team
- Transitioned to the QA department and enhanced an existing JMeter test suite by creating a developer-centric Web UI for scheduling tests
- Developed a unified Selenium automation framework, enabling teams to write tests seamlessly across different business unit verticals
Skills & Expertise
Languages
- GoLang
- Java
- TypeScript / JavaScript
- Python
- C#
Cloud & Infrastructure
- AWS (Lambda, ECS, Fargate, EC2)
- Google Cloud Platform
- Docker & Kubernetes
- Terraform & CloudFormation
Frameworks & Tools
- React / Next.js
- Spring Boot
- GraphQL
- Event-Driven Architecture
- Microservices
Leadership
- Technical Mentoring
- Architecture Design
- Code Review
- Standards & Best Practices
DevOps
- CI/CD Pipelines
- AWS CodeBuild
- Deployment Automation
- Infrastructure as Code
Creative Technology
- Unity 3D
- Unreal Engine
- Autodesk Maya
- Game Development
