David Baskin
Verified Expert in Engineering
Full-stack Developer
David has over a decade of experience in the fintech, healthcare, and SaaS industries at companies spanning three employees to thousands. Comfortable working with stakeholders at all levels, he also excels at working with ambiguous requirements and can run with minimal direction, drilling down to provide early value and iterating until the optimal product is delivered. David is quick to pick up new technologies and become an expert in delivering state-of-the-art solutions.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Node.js, CI/CD Pipelines, Docker, AWS Lambda, TypeScript, Python 3, Terraform, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB
The most amazing...
...thing I've developed is an AI-based CRM for investors that ingests data from hundreds of sources and generates dashboards on potential investment targets.
Work Experience
Lead Engineer | CTO
Notissia
- Inherited a legacy collaboration application for investors and led the technical effort to modernize and pivot the business to an AI-based CRM.
- Worked directly with the CEO to outline the product roadmap and conduct Agile ceremonies. Responsible for executing all back-end and DevOps tickets. Led an offshore team of developers responsible for executing front-end tickets.
- Implemented Agile processes to dramatically improve development team velocity.
- Rearchitected application to move to a 100% serverless architecture. Reduced AWS bill by over 90% while maintaining application performance and continuously growing product functionality and usage.
- Added modern observability, logging, and security to the application.
- Developed a Chrome extension to work alongside the Notissia application to aid users in easily adding data to Notissia.
- Added a freemium model for users to self upgrade from a free version of the product to a paid plan.
DevOps Consultant
Signpost
- Migrated the entire CI/CD infrastructure from Amazon Codebuild + Lambda to CircleCI.
- Led a DevOps team. Responded to all outages and led the recovery effort, post-mortem analysis, and process improvements.
- Acted as a knowledge expert for the team, helping to unblock engineers via pair programming, Slack meetings, and code reviews.
- Managed AWS expenses. Reduced the monthly AWS bill by over 40% in one business unit and 35% overall, resulting in a yearly savings of over $100,000.
President
Baskin Consulting, LLC
- Worked as an independent consultant; helped meet the software, DevOps, and organizational needs of various startups and small businesses.
- Designed and implemented the migration from an internally built CI/CD platform to CircleCI. Improved the data available to software engineers and increased the number of daily deploys to production.
- Led and executed an enterprise-wide implementation of Splunk Observability Cloud, including migration of log messages, implementation of APM and RUM monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring.
- Audited client's AWS account and identified multiple areas for cost savings, translating into around 25% monthly bill reduction.
Lead Software Engineer | Senior Software Engineer
Signpost
- Acted as the technical team lead for the expansion team; a team of four software engineers focused on developing Signpost's new mobile app from MVP to 100 daily active users in six months.
- Designed and built an internal feature enablement framework.
- Created and led the development of an internal service to handle all billing operations.
- Developed a custom build and deploy framework used by all Signpost components.
- Led a team of three engineers to double the number of third-party integrations with the Signpost platform, collecting customer user and transaction data. Streamlined the integration process so that it could be outsourced to an offshore team.
- Served as the lead DevOps engineer, responsible for executing all AWS operations in development environments up to production. Supported the development efforts of 15 engineers.
- Interviewed and hired back-end and front-end engineers at the junior and senior levels.
Senior Software Engineer
Newport Private Group
- Worked as the sole internal developer and the main point of technical contact leading the development of HealthConnect, a joint venture between Northwell Health and Newport Health Solutions.
- Served as the lead developer for HealthConnect, a C# application used in three New York City emergency rooms and dozens of local outpatient medical facilities to refer discharged patients to local specialists and primary care physicians.
- Developed HealthConnect Engage, a proprietary C# rule engine that allows a non-technical admin to create guidelines for phone and email client support representatives supporting various medical offices.
- Created an Avaya phone record ETL pipeline and incorporated this data into Health Connect's data reporting.
- Served as the Newport Technical Lead in all meetings between Northwell Health and HealthConnect stakeholders.
- Worked with a team of consultants to pitch and win several new business contracts to secure growth of the platform.
- Designed and built a WordPress site for Newport Health's parent company at Newportrealestatepartners.com.
Lead Sales Engineer (2014-2016) | Senior Product Support Engineer (2013-2014)
S&P Capital IQ
- Developed an automated WPF application to resolve over a dozen of the most common issues with installing and running the S&P Capital IQ Microsoft Office Plugin.
- Led a team of ten global software engineers responsible for troubleshooting client issues with the CIQ Office plugin and Realtime Stock Quote application.
- Built a knowledge base of over 100 articles discussing technical issues with CIQ products, allowing over 75% of issues to be handled by non-technical support agents and growth of an offshore technical support team.
Applications Engineer
Crestron
- Provided programming solutions to dealers, enterprises, and university partners, integrating Crestron equipment in the field.
- Traveled onsite to support high-value projects and ensure successful deployments.
- Worked on a team to build the Crestron Electronics technical presentation for CES 2012.
Integration Engineer
Videon Central
- Imported, verified, and merged weekly software packages from various customers and partners.
- Created and managed code releases to prospective and existing customers.
- Ported the codebase to allow it to compile and function on numerous different hardware platforms.
- Implemented various improvements to the integration process, such as automating Java package imports, simplifying board provisioning procedures, and developing new tools to help with identifying debugging information.
Experience
Signpost Mobile
http://www.signpost.comI served as the team lead for this project, responsible for architecting new features, integrating them with the greater Signpost offering, and leading the development effort to ship releases.
HealthConnect
I was the sole in-house developer on this project, responsible for leading development, managing the technical relationship with external consultants and internal stakeholders, and working out technical details with the client hospital network.
Major CI/CD Migration
I was able to centralize all of the common build logic into a custom CircleCI orb and created a standardized process to build and deploy over 20 GitHub projects.
As part of this migration, I was able to add new features for the client, including live, isolated deployments of code when it is submitted for pull requests, auto deployments upon merging, and custom workflows for easily managing manual deployments and rollbacks.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering
The Pennsylvania State University - University Park, PA, United States
Certifications
AWS Certified Developer – Associate
Amazon Web Services
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, Twilio API, jQuery, Nodeunit, Chai, Stripe, React, AWS Amplify, Facebook SDK, Google API
Tools
AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), GitHub, CircleCI, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), AWS IAM, Jenkins, AWS CodeBuild, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Docker Compose, Jira, Amazon CloudWatch, Recurly, Visual Studio, Subversion (SVN), Mocha, Expo, WebStorm, Git, Splunk, Terraform, VPN, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon CloudFront CDN, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CLI, AWS Step Functions, Amazon Cognito, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), AWS AppSync, OpenVPN
Languages
JavaScript, C#.NET, TypeScript, Python, Python 3, SQL, C#, Bash Script, Java, HTML, CSS, ECMAScript (ES6), Bash, GraphQL
Paradigms
Asynchronous Programming, DevOps, Automation, REST API Architecture, Microservices Architecture, Agile, Automated Testing, Test-driven Development (TDD), Serverless Architecture, REST
Platforms
AWS Lambda, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, AWS ALB, PagerDuty, Linux, Amazon EC2, Azure, Windows, Android, iOS, Twilio, AWS NLB
Frameworks
OAuth 2, .NET, Knockout (Knockout.js), React Native
Storage
MySQL, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Elasticsearch, MemSQL, Datadog, Redshift
Other
Full-stack, Back-end Development, Scraping, Web Scraping, APIs, CI/CD Pipelines, Serverless, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), API Gateways, SDKs, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Route 53, ESLint, Interviews, Crestron, Embedded Systems, Embedded Software, Software Engineering, DevOps Engineer, AWS DevOps, Architecture, Amazon RDS, Amazon Cognito User Pools, AWS Management Console, Investor Presentations, OpenAI, OpenAI GPT-4 API, Pinecone, Chrome Extensions, Webhooks, Amazon API Gateway, API Integration, AWS Certified Developer, AWS Certificate Manager, SingleStore, Cost Control, CTO
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring