Braden Hitchcock
Principal Software Engineer
Professional Experience
- Led a multi-background team promoting cross-program software collaboration, providing advice, guidance, and feedback on software architecture, technology choices, and DevOps practices
- Led a team of engineers with varying levels of experience in the continued development of infrastructure software for the next-generation architecture supporting the tracking components of a missile defense system
- Contributed to various components written in C++ supporting a wide range of infrastructure software and operational services for a missile defense system
- Engaged with stakeholders and product owners regularly during agile development of software in order to understand requirements, participate in reviews, and meet their needs
- Continued leading refinement of a Multi-Classification DevOps process leveraging Bitbucket, Jenkins, SonarQube, Nexus Repository, and OpenShift for containerized CI/CD
- Trained teams working across multiple programs on a Multi-Classification C++ development process using Conan and modern CI/CD tools, improving maintainability of several codebases and increasing engineering efficiency
- Designed, developed, and deployed an innovative platform-agnostic framework for validated microservice configuration written in C++ using gRPC, now used across multiple contracted programs
- Analyzed the performance of a component in our missile tracking system written in C/C++, implementing architectural enhancements and code modifications to reduce latency and improve throughput
- Led an investigation that added in-memory databases to our real-time tracking software using Hazelcast in order to increase scalability and lay groundwork to reduce latency, increase throughput, and improve flexibility and maintainability
- Led the software development of a customer demonstration written in Python using VTK and Qt to prove expertise and capture new business
- Co-led the transformation of a legacy monolithic system for missile tracking into a distributed, real-time microservice architecture as part of a small team of senior-level software and algorithm developers.
- Participated in the creation of a proposal estimating required effort to create and maintain infrastructure for a distributed, real-time object tracking system as part of larger re-architecture effort.
- Redesigned and refactored an event simulator for tracking algorithm development, resulting in a significant increase in flexibility, extensibility, and performance, including a 60% increase in event processing speed.
- Co-led the research, design, and implementation of a Multi-Classification DevSecOps process that increased maintainability and scalability of software components, improved employee engagement, and increased our ability to bring in more talent.
- Presented at multiple seminars for disseminating technical expertise and providing professional development opportunities for fellow employees.
- Trained fellow employees on modern software development technologies, practices, and processes.
- Assisted junior developers in developing a greater understanding of the principles behind good software design and implementation.
- Designed and implemented an API management system hosted in Azure, enabling the company to increase revenue through public APIs
- Redesigned and refactored a legacy .NET Framework application, migrating it to .NET Core, furthering the company vision of running microservices in Kubernetes
- Participated in Domain Driven Design of innovated microservices connected via Apache Kafka
- Developed a framework in Java and C++ for altering the workflow of big-data through processing applications at runtime, dramatically reducing coupling among system components and reducing maintenance and evolution costs
- Developed a C++ library for bootstrapping applications running in a modular framework, reducing third-party app code count by 70%
- Designed and built user interfaces in Angular 6 and ReactJS for various company projects, helping the company provide modern, cloud-friendly access to their applications
- Built a custom user interface in HTML5 for a revolutionary new dialysis machine
- Participated in meetings about a custom operating system for a new dialysis machine
Education
- Coursework includes soware engineering, soware evolution, distributed systems, database management systems, machine learning, programming languages, and project management
- Coursework includes software engineering, distributed systems, networking, computer security, data structures, and algorithms
Certifications
- Mastery includes demonstrating a deep understanding of fundamental principles and patterns of software architecture, including identifying system quality attributes, engaging with stakeholders to address requirements and risks, performing analysis of existing architectures, and effectively communicating software architecture through documentation
Additional Work Experience
- Coordinated and led a team of nine undergraduate teaching assistants as we assisted 200 online students learn modern web development
- Provided instruction, guidance, and mentoring to students and undergraduate teaching assistants
- Created an assignment submission tool in Node.js with a MySQL persistence layer and CAS authentication to facilitate TA knowledge and skill evaluations
- Instructed students on database fundamentals, helping them gain mastery of MySQL and Node.js to build modern web applications
- Designed and built the alliance website in HTML/CSS/JavaScript with PHP backend and a MySQL persistence layer
- Designed a project showcase website for students in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department to build personal portfolios of projects
- Assisted in the redesign and implementation of the Senior Design Capstone website, allowing students and professionals to connect and collaborate on various projects
- Designed and implemented online tools using Coldfusion, MySQL, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, automating and improving efficiency for critical chapter reporting
- Assisted in planning and implementing the upgrade of primary association websites to use the open-source Drupal CMS framework, significantly reducing maintenance overhead and improving usability for employees
- Conducted experiments for fine-tuning and improving a custom dialysis machine
- Took inventory and organized lab supplies, building additional office furniture as required
Leadership Experience
- Trained other volunteers on improving their teaching, language, and interpersonal skills
- Gained fluency in Korean, facilitating our objective to assist others in improving the quality of their lives, accomplishing their goals, and reaching their full potential
- Taught an interactive seminar (recorded as a webinar) on the Rust programming language, providing students with resources to help them build safer and more reliable systems programs
Personal Projects
- Currently under active development, this technology leverages the ReactJS, Node.js, Rust, and the Serverless
Framework to build a complete development platform for
microservice-based systems, providing the first model-based, interactive integrated development environment for scalable cloud development on any cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.)
- Developed a Python module for testing and interacting with the pico-engine, an actor-based, event-driven framework for developing Internet-of-Things technologies
Innovate. Instruct. Inspire.
