Leah Ferrell

github.com/leahferrell

Mission Statement

Leah is a software engineer with 8 years of experience across a wide variety of technologies. She is passionate about clean code, keeping it simple, and loves collaborating with other developers. Her strongest skill set is on the backend, but she loves to jump in wherever there is the greatest need.

During the summer of 2023, Leah decided to take some time away from her tech career to pursue artistic passions. Her dream since she was a teenager was to one day become a full-time artist. However, after spending many months working on art, she missed the intellectual gratification that comes with software engineering. With renewed energy, Leah is excited to get back into the tech industry and collaborate with others who are just as passionate about their craft.

Experience

Career Break - Pursuing Passion Projects

June 2023 - Current

  • See mission statement

Capital One

Dec 2018 - May 2023

Lead Software Engineer / Manager

Feb 2022 - May 2023

  • Team lead of 6 software engineers supporting internal and external integrations with the Multi-Lender Platform in Auto Finance.
  • Enhanced platform APIs to utilize an on-behalf-of-identity header so that the system could know the originating context of a micro front end. Coordinated rollout across 7 teams.
  • Led Spring Boot upgrade effort across 13 components owned by the team.
  • Enhanced a dealer settings tool so that a dealer could choose their Capital One Lender Partner(s) without need for a manual process.
  • Designed and led rollout of a new system to handle platform tenant configurations as code, utilizing S3, DynamoDB, and SQS

Senior Software Engineer

Feb 2020 - Feb 2022

  • Developed an auto dealer website button that enables a customer to get prequalified with an auto loan from Capital One. The button is now on thousands of dealer sites.
  • Improved button load time performance from > 4 seconds to < 1 second by migrating to web components.
  • Integrated with custom Identity Provider (IDP) so that customers could securely stay logged in across dealer websites.
  • Enhanced dealer website experience by adding the capability to get prequalified with a Capital One Lender Partner, increasing the overall customer approval rates by 50%.

Software Engineer

Dec 2018 - Feb 2020

  • Member of the Eno Chatbot team, supporting several Scala and Java components.
  • Scaled chatbot platform to support more than 500 users per second.
  • Created performance testing automation workflow, enabling engineers to execute, evaluate and archive tests with variable load profiles at the click of a button.
  • Developed webservice to collect and publish customer related events into a data lake for use by analytic teams.
  • Provided first-line, on-call support for production components by maintaining an incident response time of less than 5 minutes, engaging upstream/downstream business partners when needed, analyzing impact numbers and determining root-cause analysis.

State Farm

Jan 2016 - Nov 2018

Software Developer III

Sept 2017 - Nov 2018

Software Developer II

Jan 2016 - Sept 2017

  • Team leader of 8 software developers for an agile team specialized in providing big data services in support of the roll out of a new policy admin system.
  • Created multiple processes in Apache Spark and Scala to migrate and transform data from customer- and agent-facing applications into HDFS, preparing the data for analytic teams.
  • Developed workflows to ingest data at a rate of 10 million transactions per day.
  • Integrated first new billing solution in 20+ years by creating, modifying, and supporting 12 different REST, SOAP, ESB, and UI applications.

Education

B.S. Computer Science

2015

University of Texas at Dallas

GPA: 3.85 / 4.00

Certifications

AWS Solutions Architect Associate

2024

Verification: 94f2d0399f6e47c188d38317a93967c1

Skills

Top Skills:

  • Java - 7+ years
  • JavaScript/TypeScript - 4+ years
  • HTML/CSS - 4+ years
  • Spring/Springboot - 7+ years
  • React - 4+ years
  • AWS - 5+ years
  • Jenkins - 7+ years
  • Kafka - 5+ years
  • SQL - 5+ years
  • Dynamo DB - 2+ years
  • Splunk - 7+ years
  • New Relic - 4+ years
  • Scala - 2+ years
  • Web Components - 1+ years
  • Docker - 5+ years

Familiar with:

  • Python - 1 year
  • Bash - 2 years
  • Kotlin - 2 years
  • Rust - < 1 year
  • Apache Spark - 1 year
  • Akka - 1 year
  • Apache Cassandra - 1+ years
  • Terraform - < 1 year
  • Groovy - 2+ years

Personal Projects

Tetris

2021

Created a clone of Tetris in order to improve skills in TypeScript, React, and Redux

Intel 8080 Emulator

2019

Written in Rust