Craig Harsip, Developer in Boston, MA, United States

Craig Harsip

Data Engineer and Developer

Location
Boston, MA, United States
Toptal Member Since
May 17, 2021

Craig has 20 years of experience with custom software development and API integrations in high-scale eCommerce environments. An AWS Certified Solution Architect, Craig specializes in the design, implementation, and optimization of databases and workload migration to the cloud. Craig has a track record of leading teams and collaborating with diverse stakeholders of all levels to assess priorities and develop technology strategies.

Craig is available for hire
Hire Craig

Portfolio

EF Education First
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache Kafka, StreamSets, RabbitMQ, Amazon RDS...
Vistaprint
AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Connect, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Python...
Vistaprint
Ruby, Workforce Management (WFM), Jira REST API, NICE Systems, REST, SOAP...

Experience

Contact Centers - 15 yearsSQL Server 2010 - 10 yearsPython - 3 yearsAmazon RDS - 3 yearsAWS Lambda - 3 yearsAWS Database Migration Service - 2 yearsAmazon Connect - 2 yearsAmazon API Gateway - 2 years

Location

Boston, MA, United States

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Python, Amazon RDS, MacOS

The most amazing...

...innovation I've made was an IVR call flow generator, allowing the system to scale to meet the company's expansion while reducing the developer support required.

Work Experience

2021 - PRESENT

Senior Director of Engineering

EF Education First
  • Directed the development and execution of multiple projects, establishing the scope and schedule, and balancing the work and needs of the in-house and offshore contract team members.
  • Developed the strategy and vision for replacing monolithic apps with a distributed architecture. The new architecture is hosted in Kubernetes and centers around .NET Core microservices, which communicate to external systems via Kafka and StreamSets.
  • Drove a series of process improvements which resulted in increased velocity and reduction in post-release outages.
  • Developed a repeatable process for migrating the company's on-premise SQL Server databases to AWS RDS PostgreSQL via the AWS Database Migration Service.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache Kafka, StreamSets, RabbitMQ, Amazon RDS, PostgreSQL, .NET Core, .NET, C#, React, ETL Tools, ETL, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Lambda, Database Migration, Microsoft Power BI, Business Intelligence (BI), Cloud, Architecture, Agile, Amazon Cognito, APIs, Terraform
2016 - 2020

Director of Technology

Vistaprint
  • Defined the roadmap, communicated with developers and stakeholders, and led the delivery and operational success of seven software development squads.
  • Delivered several components of Vistaprint’s new eCommerce platform. These components were primarily Node.js services which were hosted in Kubernetes and then published to a Snowflake data lake.
  • Collaborated with other teams to ensure that the processes ran smoothly, i.e., that they could easily refine our platform APIs (which we would later consume) and design APIs that we could later publish.
  • Migrated Vistaprint's contact center operations from 45 globally distributed on-premise Cisco and NICE servers to Amazon Connect.
  • Implemented data pipelines and speech analytics capabilities using AWS machine learning APIs such as Transcribe and Comprehend, Lambda, Python, and Snowflake SQL.
Technologies: AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Connect, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Python, Snowflake, Salesforce Service Cloud, Node.js, Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, React, Gatsby, Looker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), eCommerce APIs, REST APIs, Business Intelligence (BI), Cloud, Architecture, Agile, APIs
2011 - 2016

Senior Manager of Technology

Vistaprint
  • Developed and delivered a multiyear technology roadmap.
  • Designed and built a set of .NET APIs which abstracted the complexity of Vistaprint's monolithic site architecture from the CRM. These APIs allowed the CRM to support other sites and brands without requiring code changes to the CRM.
  • Established Vistaprint’s first full-stack software development team in an offshore office. Recruited and grew the team from the first hire to eight engineers and integrated them into the organization.
  • Built the ETL in SQL Server SSIS to populate a data mart sourced from multiple third-party and custom software packages. This data was then imported into Vistaprint's data warehouse for inclusion in multiple cubes and business operations reports.
Technologies: Ruby, Workforce Management (WFM), Jira REST API, NICE Systems, REST, SOAP, Data Modeling, Data Queries, Database Administration (DBA), Data Visualization, eCommerce APIs, REST APIs, Relational Databases, Database Performance, ETL, ETL Tools, Agile, Data, Data Architecture, APIs
2002 - 2011

Senior Lead Software Engineer

VistaPrint
  • Designed and implemented innovative contact center solutions, including an IVR-based payment collection system that allowed agents to securely process orders and a data-driven menu system that enabled us to scale to hundreds of unique call flows.
  • Rearchitected data pipelines and tools for the creative team to design and deploy a variety of digital product offerings and templates.
  • Designed and implemented a customer recognition engine in a database of 10 million customers, which enabled savings of 30 seconds per call at the contact center.
  • Led several projects, including three new digital product offerings, and was in charge of the requirements definition, technical specification, implementation, and post-launch analysis.
Technologies: SQL Server 2010, Data Transformation, ETL, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), VB.NET, C#, ASP.NET, .NET, CTI, Call Centers, Contact Centers, Cisco UCCE, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL, Data Queries, Data Visualization, SQL Server DBA, Database Administration (DBA), Data Reporting, Databases, Database Design, Microsoft Excel, Data Modeling, Data Pipelines, Microsoft SQL Server, DB, Stored Procedure, SQL Stored Procedures, Data Engineering, Microsoft DBA, SQL Views, Views, Query Plan, Query Optimization, eCommerce APIs, Relational Databases, Database Performance, ETL Tools, Database Optimization, CSV, Data, Data Architecture, T-SQL (Transact-SQL), Data Migration, SQL DML, Performance Tuning, SQL Performance

Experience

Amazon Connect Migration

This project involved replacing a legacy call center platform with Amazon Connect, AWS's SaaS call center in the cloud product. The goal was to have a modern platform that would significantly lower the effort required to build more intuitive customer service interactions and to extract insights from the data logged about these interactions.

To make the business case for investment, I authored a 1-page document outlining the limitations of the legacy solution, the promise of the AWS solution, and the cost difference, and presented this to the CEO and chief data officer.

I wrote some scripts to migrate the output of AWS's text analysis services to our data warehouse so that the customer analytics teams could answer the question: "What types of questions can we answer with this data?"

I also led the development team responsible for integrating Connect into our website and CRM and identifying and implementing the networking infrastructure changes required.

CRM Replatform

The goal of this product was to replace a legacy on-premise CRM system with Salesforce Service Cloud while allowing the CRM to scale to support a growing number of eCommerce sites.

I was the architect and team lead responsible for designing and implementing the solution.

To support the migration and expansion, I:
• Created microservices layer to abstract the CRM from the knowledge of the implementation details of either site.
• Defined a common interface, enforced that the new site adheres to this interface, and built an adapter on top of the monolith.
• Created an adapter to convert the new interface to the old one so that we would not need to make changes to the legacy CRM and to reduce risk.

Bidask.harsip.com

https://bidask.harsip.com/
I developed this site to provide an easy interface for several Python-based scripts that I had developed to analyze the stock market and get more hands-on experience with React. This is an entirely serverless site, hosted in S3 and backed by Python scripts running in Lambda.

Skills

Languages

SQL, Stored Procedure, JavaScript, Python, VB.NET, C#, Snowflake, T-SQL (Transact-SQL), Ruby, SQL DML

Tools

Cisco UCCE, Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise, Amazon Connect, Query Plan, AWS IAM, Microsoft Excel, AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Athena, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Looker, RabbitMQ, Microsoft Power BI, Amazon Cognito, Terraform

Paradigms

ETL, Database Design, Agile, Microservices, REST, Business Intelligence (BI)

Platforms

AWS Lambda, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jupyter Notebook, MacOS, Amazon EC2, Apache Kafka

Storage

Databases, Microsoft SQL Server, DB, SQL Stored Procedures, SQL Views, Relational Databases, JSON, Amazon Aurora, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server DBA, Database Administration (DBA), Data Pipelines, Microsoft DBA, Database Migration, Amazon DynamoDB, SQL Server 2010, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Database Performance, SQL Performance

Other

Amazon RDS, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), CTI, Call Centers, Contact Centers, Data Queries, Data Reporting, Data Modeling, Data Engineering, Query Optimization, Database Optimization, Cloud, Architecture, Amazon API Gateway, Data Transformation, Workforce Management (WFM), AWS Database Migration Service, Data Visualization, eCommerce APIs, CSV File Processing, CSV, Data, Data Architecture, Amazon Route 53, Machine Learning, Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, NICE Systems, SOAP, Amazon Kinesis, Salesforce Service Cloud, Gatsby, Views, StreamSets, ETL Tools, Finance, Data Migration, APIs, Performance Tuning

Frameworks

.NET, ASP.NET, .NET Core

Libraries/APIs

Pandas, REST APIs, Scikit-learn, NumPy, Jira REST API, Node.js, React

Education

1997 - 2001

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute - Troy, NY, United States

Certifications

JANUARY 2021 - PRESENT

Classical Machine Learning for Financial Engineering

New York University

JUNE 2020 - JUNE 2023

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate

AWS