• Hi!
    I'm Lucas.

    Innovative and passionate IT leader. Strong technical background, always learning.

    Download CV

Education

Education

Bachelor of Science - Combined Major Computer Science and Mathematics
University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan

Experience

Work Experience

Senior Software Developer, AWS IAM Identity Center
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
November 2022 - Present

Technical lead for an S-Team goal to deliver OAuth 2.0 standards compliant identity propagation for AWS services integrated with Identity Center that was shipped at re:Invent 2023. Mentored and collaborated with junior engineers by reviewing designs and code, holding office hours and keeping an eye out for future implications of design choices. Worked with development teams across Redshift, Lake Formation, Athena, S3, and EMR to successfully integrate their services with the new feature. Led the operational readiness review to ensure all aspects of this major feature were ready for production. Planned and executed load tests with 10x the current production traffic to identity bottlenecks and remediated several major launch blocking risks as a result. Contributed to operational excellence on a regular basis. Most notably, reduced sev-2 tickets by 80% per month by regionalizing, scaling up, and adding safety mechanisms to a shared dependency that was being used and overloaded by multiple teams.

Software Development Manager, AmazonMQ
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
September 2020 - November 2022

Managed 3 teams of software developers who built and operated the world’s largest fleet of Apache ActiveMQ message brokers. Led initiatives to improve architecture and design processes, improve velocity of the team and reduce operational load on the team. Successfully reduced annual sev-2 ticket rate by 42% across ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ service offerings by analyzing and prioritizing defects or gaps in the service. Led a project from inception through to private beta to enable cross-AWS region message replication for ActiveMQ that was eventually launched in Q3 2023. Mentored and collaborated with engineers throughout the evaluation of various replication strategies. Owned the operations of the ActiveMQ service with effective mechanisms such as weekly operations reviews, correction of errors investigations, root causes analysis for customers, and as an on-call escalation manager supporting Amazon MQ, SNS, SQS, MSK, and more messaging and streaming services.

Chief Technology Officer
Vivvo Application Studios
November 2019 - August 2020

Responsible for technical leadership and mentoring of 3 development teams, overall technical architecture, and new product innovation. Initiated and led projects to mature the CitizenOne product such as a modernization of the frontend design and technology, standards compliance and certification for SAML and OAuth 2.0 SP/IdP features, migration to Kubernetes to reduce operational burden, and integration with cloud solutions such as Azure CDN, WAF, managed Kubernetes and managed databases to improve scalability, security and uptime. Lead the way by being hands on via foundational work such as the initial Kubernetes migration and an authentication proxy to secure customer webapps. Delivered the most complex and sensitive features such as standards compliant SAML Single Logout feature.

Principal Developer
Vivvo Application Studios
October 2017 - November 2019

Led the architecture and development of a new product, Business Connect, which launched with the Government of Saskatchewan in 2018. Developed initial prototypes of the Eeze passwordless authentication mobile wallet, backend service, and integration with Vivvo’s core product, Citizen One. Engaged with the W3C Decentralized Identity and Verifiable Credentials communities including presentations at the Internet Identity Workshop on Decentralized Identity and proposals for standardizing DID-based passwordless authentication. Led important client engagements such as launching Citizen One with eHealth Saskatchewan and proof of concept work with Industry Science and Economic Development Canada. Designed, built and deployed a new custom built authentication service including SMS and TOTP MFA, multifaceted account lockout strategy, and support for migrating accounts from a variety of authentication solutions that is now serving 300k DAU with eHealth Saskathewan’s health portal.

Senior Developer Consultant
Thoughtworks
March 2017 - September 2017

Consultant at a major Canadian telecommunications company. Trained and mentored client development teams through pair programming, code reviews, and development of a technical reference architecture. Worked closely with internal teams to build and deploy an e-commerce system to support internet and television packages, and the release of the iPhone X.

Implemnted best practices for continuous integration and deployment, unit tests, integration tests and contract tests. Application was automatically deployed to production on average 11 times per day. Configured and supported production deployment on OpenShift to easily scale to 100,000 concurrent users the day the iPhone X was released.

Senior Developer
Farm Credit Canada
June 2014 - March 2017

As a senior developer on an agile scrum team, participate in solution design, project estimation, development and production support. Mentor team members on agile methodology, coding best practices and managing their workload in a sprint. Primarily responsible for SAP development and frequent contributor to Java and Angular codebases.

Lead proof of concept and implementation of SAP HANA sidecar for loan balances calculations. Worked with vendor, operations, finance and IT business analysts to develop a loan balances model that vastly outperformed the existing loan balances function.

Developer
Farm Credit Canada
June 2011 - June 2014

Member of the SAP team delivering services and extending functionality of SAP CML and CMS. As lead developer on the customer correspondence project, worked with business and QA analysts and printing/shipping vendors to develop clear and accurate customer statements that every FCC customer received.

Member of the first cross-functional team and agile pilot project. Championed agile development practices and scrum. Acquired expertise and in-depth knowledge of FCC products while developing solutions such as a loan calculator and cost of credit calculator. Mentored and onboarded team members in agile methodology and adjusting to new cadence of work as they joined scrum teams.

Lead the adoption of best practices such as unit testing and code reviews. Developed supporting tools such as ABAP plugins for FitNesse and Phabricator. Mentored SAP development team on object-oriented development and modern ABAP.

Desktop Support Analyst
Farm Credit Canada
May 2008 - June 2011

Provided tier-2 support for all workstations at Farm Credit Canada. Responsible for automating configuration, distribution and management of software. Worked closely with vendors and external support groups to resolve issues. Participated in on-call rotation supporting a number of applications for internal users across Canada and India.

Get in Touch

Contact