Elliott Foster

Experience

• Optum

  Eden Prairie, MN (Remote)
  Director, Software Engineering August 2024 - present

  Accomplishments

  • Led integration of Episource engineering teams into OptumInsight
  • Worked with departmental leaders to evolve Episource practices and procedures to align with Optum/UHG
  • Co-led competitive analysis and proof of concept for enterprise data governance
  • Oversaw data quality enforcement using Great Expectations to enhance real-time data pipeline reliability, aligning with HIPAA and internal data governance standards

  Responsibilities

  • Cross-functional leader for multiple engineering teams
  • Manager of teams through Team Leads and Engineering Managers
  • Driver of departmental process changes
  • Product backlog development and delivery on key milestones

• Episource

  Gardena, CA (Remote)
  Director of Engineering August 2022 - August 2024

  Accomplishments

  • Implemented engineering Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics, driving a culture of continuous improvement and accountability within the engineering department
  • Spearheaded the implementation of DAST testing as part of CI/CD pipelines, significantly enhancing the security posture of the company's software products while minimizing release cycle times
  • Championed the adoption of feature flagging techniques utilizing LaunchDarkly, enabling seamless feature rollouts, A/B testing, and targeted feature releases, resulting in improved product iteration cycles
  • Partnered with other engineering leaders to complete HITRUST certification for the organization
  • Grew first level managers in effective leadership skills and team growth strategies
  • Delivered first-to-market solution for risk adjustment using the CMS-HCC Model V28

  Responsibilities

  • Cross-functional leader for multiple engineering teams
  • Manager of teams through Team Leads and Engineering Managers
  • Driver of departmental process changes
  • Product backlog development and delivery on key milestones
• Software Engineering Manager August 2021 - August 2022

  Accomplishments

  • Grew individual contributors to be better engineers
  • Delivered key feature enhancements for the Episource Analyst product using React, GraphQL, and Nest.js

  Responsibilities

  • Work with product to prioritize development efforts
  • Manage and mentor direct reports
  • Work with peer managers to improve department and company-wide processes
  • Lead team in development of coding, security, and deployment standards for cloud-native applications
• Lead Software Engineer March 2020 - August 2021

  Accomplishments

  • Led the development and deployment of the Episource Analyst for Medicaid product using React, GraphQL, and Nest.js

  Responsibilities

  • Manager and team lead for both Medicare and Medicaid epiAnalyst teams
  • Leading adoption of GraphQL for Episource APIs

• Four Kitchens

  Austin, TX
  Architect December 2010 - March 2020

  Accomplishments

  • Team lead to internal developers, responsible for weekly 1 on 1's, unblocking teammates, and aiding in goal setting and professional development.
  • Technical lead for the NBC project, overseeing architectural, technological, and best practices decisions.
  • Presented about the NBC team's use of Amazon Neptune at AWS re:Invent 2019
  • Progressively migrated NBC's primary data store from a document store to a graph database.
  • Scaled NBC's API traffic from a few thousand requests per day to tens of millions of requests per day.
  • Architected backend for frontend (BFF) micro APIs for encapsulating complicated business logic server side and allowing for lighter front ends.
  • Designed and built node.js powered data pipeline to ingest content from multiple CMSs and surface data through a REST API that powers all NBC applications as well as NBC.com.
  • Implemented the node.js based REST API that powers the Saturday Night Live iOS app and website.
  • Architected and built REST API for the Emmy Award winning The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and NBC.com websites.
  • Developed and administered Integrating Node.js and Drupal training for DrupalCon Portland 2013.
  • Built Drupal Poetry, a responsive magnetic poetry web app.
  • Redeployed the search system for The Economist using hosted Apache Solr.

  Responsibilities

  • Managing and mentoring a team of engineers on professional growth and performance.
  • Design, build, and maintain custom systems for clients.
  • Diagnose and fix performance problems on large scale distributed systems.
  • Train clients in using and building high performance distributed systems.

• New Media Broadcasting Company/ Direct2Care

  Glendale, CA
  Head of Web Development July 2005 - December 2010

  Accomplishments

  • Deployed Varnish reverse proxy and static file cache for MashCast Drupal system.
  • Deployed Apache Solr faceted search for MashCast Drupal system.
  • Deployed memcached and MySQL master-slave servers for scalability of the MashCast Drupal system.
  • Wrote data synchronization code to keep information from a multi-site network and a desktop client server in sync
  • Wrote code to manage, re-format, and display uploaded files such as images, videos, and audio
  • Created a profile based search module
  • Wrote a horoscopes module that populates its current astrological sign information via RSS feeds
  • Worked with “themers” (HTML/CSS experts) to ensure the output from Drupal modules was easy to handle at the theme layer

  Responsibilities

  • Write Drupal modules using PHP with MySQL
  • Manage the release process from automated daily builds to release candidate to production release
  • Create monitoring suites using Nagios
  • Implement automated workflows for release process using C++ and Java programs and shell scripts