
Marty Ross
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Engineer and Developer
Berkeley, CA, United States
Toptal member since September 25, 2026
Marty is a veteran software engineer with 25+ years of experience designing and building high-performance distributed applications across finance, logistics, and media. Specializing recently in creating highly predictable, deterministic software architectures, he is an expert at delivering complex features and mentoring engineering teams. Marty's current development toolkit centers on Go, Python, TypeScript, and AWS, with a recent focus on building applications with Anthropic and Ollama.
Portfolio
Experience
- Java - 20 years
- Python - 8 years
- Node.js - 6 years
- TypeScript - 5 years
- C# - 3 years
- Go - 3 years
- Claude Code - 2 years
- Databricks - 1 year
Work Experience
Senior Software Engineer
Capital One Financial
- Introduced a multi-agent AI skill, resulting in 500% efficiency gain during support rotations to promote automated security PRs across all team repositories.
- Developed Databricks Notebooks and Spark Jobs to locate and process billions of data lake records.
- Designed and implemented multiple scalable AWS Lambda services in Python, TypeScript, and Go to process data, events, or user requests and deliver updates or responses.
- Initiated and led a program leveraging AWS FIS and custom tooling to run controlled failure experiments in production as part of CI/CD, increasing resilience and reducing recovery times.
- Led the development of an enterprise site reliability service combining a serverless Go back end (DynamoDB) and a TypeScript/Angular front end, delivering error budget dashboards, automated SLO workflows, and real-time notifications.
- Established enterprise-wide BDD integration testing patterns in Go, Java, Node.js, and Python, improving test coverage and consistency across 2,000+ teams.
- Initiated and led a program leveraging AWS FIS and custom tooling to run controlled failure experiments in production as part of CI/CD, increasing resilience and reducing recovery times.
Senior Software Engineer
Crunchyroll
- Developed AWS Step Function-driven TypeScript Lambdas for content management workflows.
- Led refactoring of four Go back-end services to improve testability and code coverage by 25%, increasing stability and developer productivity.
- Optimized MySQL queries for 2 high-traffic CMS services, increasing throughput by 20-50%.
- Reduced frequency and MTTR of critical incidents by 30% through code improvements, enhanced dashboards, and custom metrics with New Relic NRQL.
Software Engineering
Independent Consultant
- Created a batch processing system using Spring Batch for large-scale ETL workloads.
- Designed a replacement for and migration of the legacy data pipeline.
- Planned and led onboarding of several primary data sources.
Staff Software Engineer
Revinate
- Decomposed a Java monolith into containerized microservices on AWS Kubernetes.
- Built a high-throughput customer data pipeline using Kafka/KTable, gRPC, and Spark.
- Designed a plugin architecture enabling field technicians to deploy custom ETL logic independently, increasing core team availability by 50%.
- Migrated data pipeline stream from RabbitMQ to Kafka.
Staff Software Engineer
Navis
- Architected Java Equipment Control Interface (ECI) facade API to control automated guided vehicles and cranes.
- Designed and implemented a Spring Boot REST API to integrate new crane control systems, reducing onboarding time by 75%.
- Reduced MTTR by 15% through instrumentation, providing visualized traces of protocol interactions with external equipment.
- Educated others by providing mentoring, peer reviews, frequent blog posts, and presentations at lunch and learn forums.
- Championed test-driven development (TDD) with CI/CD tooling and test coverage reporting.
Application Integration Specialist
Perot Systems
- Provided IT solutions support and enhancements for Product Data Management (PDM) project, comprising mainly Windchill PDMLink and Arbortext PE Server and Editor applications, including overall integration with corporate infrastructure.
- Leveraged existing and developed new Application Monitoring tools / dashboards to reduce / streamline troubleshooting and facilitate early detection / resolution of problems, before customers do.
- Created and operationalized Reconciliation Reports using PL/SQL spanning all corporate membership databases.
- Wrote custom monitoring application scripting framework in Java; to perform availability monitoring tests and deliver results to existing monitoring / event dispatching framework (HP’s OpenView).
- Designed integration solution (including AAA toolset) for PDM Applications, including Windchill PDMLink and Arbortext PE Server into the corporate intranet, passed corporate security team reviews.
- Served as system administrator for corporate deployment of MediaWiki and Apache Proxy servers (serving both internet and intranet users).
Senior Application Architect
Mount Sinai Medical Center
- Developed an Oracle data model and API layer to support new functionality. Extended shell scripts to support new ETL of mainframe data.
- Wrote Python plug-ins to integrate SCM and Issue Tracking systems.
- Developed best practices (coding, workflow, and requirements) and Standard Operating Procedures in a service organization.
- Developed a monitoring tool and dashboard to report on the health of critical back-end processes.
- Led research and development efforts for the infrastructure upgrade of Java and JavaScript engines and migration to a Java application server platform.
- Led formulation and adoption of iterative, milestone-based development (agile) processes.
Senior Software Engineer
McGraw-Hill Education
- Worked in roles of developer, integration architect, Jakarta EE security architect and lead, and program engineer.
- Led architectural design of integration framework supporting four online systems (including an SSO realm) and five batch processes generating tens of millions of reports per year for distribution via web, FTP, and print channels.
- Mentored junior members of the engineering team across all technologies used.
- Developed and socialized best practices, including agile processes (TDD, CI, iterative, and milestone-driven “sprints”), coding standards, normal and exceptional workflow, and software configuration management.
- Facilitated cross-departmental communication between Engineering and Product, Client Services, Project Management, Quality Assurance, and Executive Management groups.
EDP Senior Programmer/Analyst
Superior Court of California
- Developed a secure web service to deliver traffic citations from divisions of the Los Angeles Police Department to the Court.
- Built a monitoring front-end website allowing clerks to retrieve a PDF facsimile of citations by search criteria, using MS Visual Studio/C#.
- Provided end-user and administrative support for several critical legal-support applications to clerks and judges.
- Wrote and managed continuous availability monitoring applications to ensure compliance with SLA.
- Spearheaded an ongoing developer forum to discuss and advance the use of SOA technology and XML schema for information exchange in the Court.
Porting Consultant
Retalix Ltd.
- Guided Retalix in porting their flagship Point of Sale product from C/C++ on Microsoft Windows to Linux.
- Redesigned the user interface to use Java API (JavaPOS) according to the requirements of the Company’s contract with a major Northeastern retailing chain using C/C++, STL, Linux, JavaPOS, JDK 1.3.
- Created a custom tiny Linux distribution with an embedded J2ME engine and a special communication networking bridge between the POS and the JavaPOS front end.
Product Architect and Senior Software Developer
Rampt.com
- Captured, documented, presented, and led the architectural analysis for a new broadband media distribution platform funded by venture capital using UML, J2ME, TCP/IP, XML-RPC, RSVP, WAP, WML, and Apache.
- Developed prototype of “home-top box” kernel, including streaming media server and embedded browser extensions.
- Performed hundreds of Monte Carlo simulations of network load to validate traffic-shaping models and algorithms, testing the effects of integrating various COTS and ready-to-use technologies using OPNET modeler.
- Developed iterations of statistical models to help support and document architecture.
Project History
Notification Lambda
Faced with fragmented data silos, I architected a Golang-based AWS Lambda function that triggers on a scheduled cron cadence. The engine executes highly optimized, complex SQL joins across disparate relational enterprise databases to dynamically identify non-compliant applications in real time. To automate organizational governance without adding operational overhead, the pipeline cross-references compliance gaps against an active stakeholder registry maintained securely in an Amazon S3 bucket.
The system seamlessly orchestrates multi-channel notifications, instantly dispatching targeted alerts via Slack webhooks and automated emails to the exact engineering leads responsible. This lightweight "soup-to-nuts" automation eliminated manual auditing and drastically accelerated compliance remediation across the entire enterprise.
Strategic Refactoring and REST API Facade for Navis N4 TOS
By standardizing vendor-specific EC platforms into a single common interface, the TOS gained a unified "view of the world." This abstraction facade slashed new EC onboarding times by 75% by isolating vendor-specific code and testing liabilities, while accelerating TOS core feature time-to-market.
This layer also enabled unified observability. I integrated performance metrics for Grafana and engineered a custom telemetry tool that parsed logs on-demand to dynamically render markdown sequence diagrams, giving instant visibility into complex TOS-to-EC transactions and reducing MTTR by 15%.
Flight Visualizer
https://github.com/noodnik2/flightvisualizerEducation
Bachelor's Degree in Economics and Computer Science
UCLA - Los Angeles, CA, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, PySpark, React, OpenAPI, OpenAI API, Java Message Service (JMS), SOAP APIs, Slack API, Rhino, Standard Template Library (STL)
Tools
Git, AWS Step Functions, Jenkins, Claude Code, Jira, Confluence, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Terraform, Helm, CircleCI, RabbitMQ, Cron, Amazon Athena, Grafana, Splunk, Amazon CloudWatch, MediaWiki, Cygwin, Trac, Oracle Access Manager (OAM), Cognos ReportNet, Apache, Perforce, Visual Studio
Languages
Python, Go, Java, TypeScript, Snowflake, C#, HTML5, Groovy, GraphQL, CSS3, XML, SQL, XSLT, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, Python 2, Facelets, C, WML, UML
Frameworks
Spring, Django, Spark, Angular, Spring Batch, gRPC, Spring Boot, Tailwind CSS, Selenium, JSF, Seam, JUnit
Platforms
Databricks, AWS Lambda, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Oracle, Kubernetes, Jakarta EE (Java EE or J2EE), Linux, JBoss, Windows, J2ME
Storage
Amazon DynamoDB, MySQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Datadog, Redis, Amazon Aurora, Oracle SQL, NoSQL, Oracle 9g, SUSE, XML Schema, XML-RPC
Paradigms
Model Context Protocol (MCP), Design Patterns, Microservices Architecture, ETL
Other
Computer Skills, Kafka, TDD, FastAPI, Express, i18n, Step Functions, CI/CD Pipelines, AI Agents, Instrumentation, Distributed Tracing, SLI/SLO/SLA, Chaos Engineering, Software Design, Google Earth KML, Aviation, New Relic Query Language (NRQL), AI Engineering, AWS Kubernetes, KTable, GCP, GitHub Actions, WebSockets, Event Streaming, Responsive Design, A11Y, Fargate, Profiling, Caching, OpenTelemetry, Performance Optimization, Distributed Systems, Statistics, Econometrics, Apache Cassandra, 3D Tracking, AeroAPI, Prometheus, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), AI Architecture, System Architecture, RESTful API Design, Enterprise Application Design, Windchill PDMLink, HP OpenView, Product Data Management (PDM), Arbortext PE, WebLogic, Ajax, DevTrack, JAAS, EJB3, PDF, JavaPOS, JDK 1.3, User Interface (UI), TCP/IP, RSVP, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Monte Carlo Simulations
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