Lucas Penz

Senior Software Engineer - Apple via TEKSystems (4/2022 - 9/2024)

Leading multinational technology company specializing in consumer electronics, software, and online services. In 2021, it generated $365.8 billion in revenue and, as of June 2022, is the world's largest company by market capitalization.

• Improved cross-team collaboration by 25% through a custom requirement-gathering framework.
• Conducted code reviews, mentoring junior developers, and enforcing best practices, improving overall code quality and maintainability
• Collaborated with customer support teams to analyze recurring technical issues, implementing backend fixes and UI improvements that reduced support tickets by 40%
• Spearheaded a high-profile project to enable seamless physical processes in warehouses, impacting millions of transactions monthly.
• Integrated third-party APIs to extend application functionality, increasing automation and reducing manual workload.
• Monitored application performance using Datadog, identifying and resolving bottlenecks before they impacted users.
• Designed and implemented fault-tolerant REST APIs for external integrations, achieving 99.99% uptime.
• Reduced SQL query execution times by 100x, leveraging advanced database optimization techniques
• Implemented background job priority through Sidekiq

Staff Software Engineer - Line 5 LLC (7/2021 - 4/2022)

Financial company which provides loans for customers to buy their car extended warranty.

• Developed testing processes including communications and task templates which improved efficiency by 30%.
• Led meeting with Product Owner and Development Team.
• Led the development of a new payment page.
• Managed application deploy and servers on Amazon EC2, S3.
• Mentored junior developers, enhancing code quality and team productivity through regular code reviews and collaborative pair programming sessions.

Senior Software Engineer - Line 5 LLC (11/2020 - 7/2021)

Financial company which provides loans for customers to buy their car extended warranty.

• Enhanced direct sales revenue by 25% through the development of self-service software utilizing Vue.js for direct customer transactions.
• Oversaw the entire software development lifecycle, encompassing automated testing and deployment through Heroku.
• Enhanced the performance of several queries, resulting in a significant increase of up to 100 times faster execution time.

Professor - Federal Technological University of Parana (8/2017 - 7/2019)

Nationally renowned university with 13 campuses.

• Planned and delivered IT courses.
• Created hands-on Agile Development course, using Ruby on Rails, GIT/Github, PostgreSQL, Ubuntu, and Bootstrap, resulting in student projects such as classes, blog, and a sales website.
• Taught Project Management Course using PMBOK guidelines to address all 10 areas of PMBOK 5.
• Developed curriculum and delivered Software Development Course, including topics such as quality, testing, and methodologies.
• Educated students in Java Concurrency / Multithreading & Java Socket.

Staff Software Engineer - German Tech Systems (1/2016 - 3/2018)

Software company providing business systems support, accounting, tax, and stock management.

• Implemented process changes that resulted in a 60% reduction in errors. These changes included more efficient code review and internal communication protocols.
• Led meetings with Product Owner and Development Team.
• Orchestrated a knowledge sharing session with the team to elucidate error handling, debugging techniques, and principles of writing clean code. This initiative resulted in a significant reduction of bugs, with a notable 50% decrease.
• A significant 50% improvement in response time was achieved through effective management of the PostgreSQL database. This was accomplished by optimizing memory and buffer parameters.
• Managed Nginx applications and servers on Amazon Web Services (AWS), including EC2 instances and S3 storage.

Software Engineer - German Tech Systems (11/2014 - 12/2015)

• Reduced required man-hours.
• Reduced memory requirements of tax calculation process (from 1.2 GB to 200 MB) by implementing a pipe processing model.
• System-user interface enhancement through menu reorganization and provision of supplementary feedback messages, including progress bars and error messages.

Software Engineer - Oderco (4/2014 - 10/2014)

Computer equipment / electronics distributor.

• Maximized security, permissions, maintenance, and performance by upgrading all internal support tools in conventional development model in PHP by CakePHP 1.3 framework, as well as Front-end Bootstrap 2.3.2 and jQuery that improved interface and usability in addition to maintenance and performance.

Software Engineer - Assis Gurgacz Foundation (12/2009 - 2/2012)

Institute of higher learning with 2,000 students.

• Built, maintained, and updated website for the institution.
• Created PHP software programs, such as Reserving, Event Controlling, and Evaluation Systems.
• Developed multiple operations, using Debian, MySQL, Apache, and Postfix.