Josh Tompkins
Chief Architect at Charles Schwab
Chief Architect, Client Experience Technologies at Charles Schwab
- Enterprise Architecture
- IT Governance
- Process Engineering
I’m a motivated, independent software engineer and architect with 15+ years experience planning, implementing, and shipping production code. I’ve worked with teams and organizations both large and small in a wide variety of tech stacks, including .NET, Java, Ruby, Node, and React. I have a history of coming up to speed quickly on new tech stacks and projects, and I’m comfortable working with stakeholders up and down the management chain. I am comfortable with public speaking, and have presented at conferences and technical meetups on a variety of topics.
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Career9
As a Distinguished Engineer at Charles Schwab, my responsibilities include guiding architectural and technical direction for the Client Experience Technologies organization, which spans over 1,200 people and several hundred distinct applications. I worked closely with the CET SVP and his executive leadership team, as well as technical product managers, solution architects, and engineers from across Schwab. The role of distinguished engineer at Schwab is very broad, blending technical, product, and management responsibilities. - Drove CET’s next-generation distributed, multi-tier architecture, codenamed Alto, from the conceptual design phase to implementation across our organization. This work included design, documentation, and defense of the architecture to Schwab’s central architecture group and our CTO. Alto now comprises the majority of our user-facing architecture, handling over 2 million requests per day across a service fabric of nearly 100 REST APIs. - Rebuilt and modernized CET’s architectural and engineering governance programs, formalizing and refocusing them towards providing holistic support for engineering teams throughout the development lifecycle. - Helped overhaul CET’s talent acquisition and interview programs. I wrote the CET Guide to Interviews, which lays out the strategy and process for improving our candidate experience, and I conduct several interviews a week, both as a subject-matter expert and as a “bar raiser”. - I help mentor senior technical leadership across CET, from senior engineers to solution architects and middle-management. Attending 1:1 meetings is an important part of my role, and I meet with 10 or more CET staff a week, to sync on ongoing work, offer architectural advice, and to provide feedback when I can. - I prototype ideas and project concepts in a number of languages, primarily focusing on the edge - client-side code in Angular and React and server-side REST and GraphQL APIs in C# and Node.
As an engineer on the Build and Deploy Tools team, I designed and implemented new features for New Relic’s custom CI/CD deploy pipeline written in Go and JavaScript, and shipped code that empowered dozens of engineering teams to ship their code quickly and efficiently, dozens or hundreds of times a day. Major features we shipped while I was on the team included automated canary promotion and rollback, automated service verification, and a revamped pipeline definition and configuration format.
As Senior Software Engineer, my responsibilities include the design, planning, and implementation of software features throughout the New Relic technical stack, as well as providing technical leadership for my team. I work closely with designers, product managers, and dev-ops engineers from across the company. - As an engineer on the Product and Subscription Services team, I assisted in the maintenance of a legacy Ruby on Rails monolith, and participated in several projects extracting major functionality into a series of microservices. As part of New Relic’s Cloud-Friendly Pricing initiative, I implemented our compute-based usage measurement system in Ruby, built on top of a Kafka data stream. - The PASS team grew quite large, and was split into two teams. As senior engineer and later technical lead on the Account Experience team, I was responsible for critical usage and billing infrastructure in four different languages - infrastructure services in Ruby and Kotlin, REST APIs in Java, and client-facing UI written in React and Angular. - As an engineer on the Browser Application Monitoring team, I contributed production code to each level of the application stack, from our high-volume intake pipeline, written in Java, to our many React-based UIs, to the Browser Agent itself. Most recently, I implemented a custom Redux-inspired Flux framework for use across the Browser portfolio.
As part of a leadership transition, I was promoted. My responsibilities expanded to include project management, software architecture, and technical leadership roles. I was involved in the prioritization, planning, and execution of new products and features, as well as the mentorship and growth of the developers on my team. - Designed the system architecture and client-side implementation for EarnWise, TradePMR's latest advisor management platform. EarnWise is an HTML5 application built using JavaScript, React, and Flux on the client and C#, Nancy, and Dapper on the server. I designed and implemented the user interface, built the OAuth authentication system, and wrote most of the application's Flux infrastructure. - Implemented TradePMR's application payment and billing system for application add-ons and 3rd party integrations. - Designed the system architecture for Cerberus, TradePMR's 3rd-party integration REST API. I also designed the UI for the developer portal that handles authentication and documentation for the API. - Transitioned the team to an agile-based development workflow, spearheaded the inclusion of unit-tests into all future TradePMR products, and implemented a GitHub Flow-based source control policy.
As Lead Software Developer, I provided technical leadership for a team of five developers in the design and implementation of desktop, web, and mobile applications. My technical responsibilities included feature planning and implementation on the client and server sides, UI design, and database design and maintenance. - Designed the UI framework and REST API that powers Fusion, TradePMR's desktop-based advisor platform. Fusion is a C#, WPF, and ASP.NET WebAPI application that serves thousands of investment advisors in their day-to-day operations. Fusion is powered by hundreds of API calls that provide data for nearly a hundred business critical features. - Designed and implemented the worker-based architecture that allows Fusion's trading, rebalancing, and account opening systems to scale to many thousands of simultaneous operations. - Built a job monitoring tool called BigBoard that monitors all of Fusion's background workers and system jobs and presents the overall system status in a single, easy-to-understand interface.
As Senior Software Developer, my responsibilities included the implementation and maintenance of TradePMR's custom financial planning and advisor management platform. - Implemented eCustody, TradePMR's first advisor platform. eCustody is an C# and ASP.NET WebForms application with a SQL Server backend. I implemented the HTML and CSS user interface from a design by TradePMR's in-house UI designer, built the Entity Framework data layer, and implemented more than half of the dozens of functions that make up the product. - Implemented a custom electronic account opening framework with XML-based customizable account forms, electronic identify verification, electronic signing, and a full-featured PDF form-generation framework. This system replaced a paper-based workflow and increased TradePMR's account-opening throughput by a factor of 10. - Transitioned eCustody through a series of low-level technical upgrades, first from Linq-to-SQL to Entity Framework, and later from .NET 3.0 to .NET 4.0.
MindSolve was acquired by SumTotal Systems, and as part of the transition, I was promoted. My responsibilities included the implementation and maintenance of SumTotal's performance management system, interaction with product planning and QA teams, and the leadership of several feature teams.
As Software Developer I at MindSolve, I participated in the planning and implementation of a C# re-write of MindSolve's comprehensive performance management project.
Blade Agency provides entertainment to conferences and corporate events. I maintained a website responsible for hosting gigabytes of artist audio and video samples. I also helped build a service that enabled event venues to sell theme park tickets to event attendees, and I later led a team that rebuilt that service into the company's first ASP.NET website. When I lef, that service was responsible for over $250,000 in ticket sales.
Skills18
Technical
Other
Projects5
Rehash is a lightweight state container based on Redux and heavily inspired by Redux Zero. Instead of a singleton in-memory store, Rehash uses the browser's hash fragment to store your serialized state.
A static site generator for your reading list.
A simple Inversion of Control library for Ruby.
Redux, but for Ruby. Inspired by Flummox, Flux Standard Actions, and redux-promise.
A lightweight CRUD wrapper for the Dapper Micro-ORM.