Jimmie Aaron Butler
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevOps Engineer and Developer
Lisbon, Portugal
Toptal member since January 3, 2021
Jimmie has deep expertise in developing back-end services in Go and managing and automating infrastructure with IaC. He specializes in Go, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and Terraform and has used these for over five years to build back-end services and CI/CD pipelines and improve automation. In one of Jimmie's most exciting projects, he developed cloud infrastructure for a central eCommerce platform that serves students at more than 900 college campuses.
Portfolio
Experience
- DevOps - 7 years
- Full-stack Development - 7 years
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - 7 years
- Kubernetes - 6 years
- Go - 6 years
- Terraform - 6 years
- React - 5 years
- OpenAI - 2 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Terraform, Go, React, ChatGPT
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on was a legal LLM (Inkly), targeted at minimizing hallucination via a RAG pipeline.
Work Experience
Lead Developer
Inkly
- Transitioned the tech stack through three pivots, from a redlines/contract negotiation tool to a real-time sales workspace similar to Notion to a legal large language model (LLM), minimizing hallucination and providing high-quality answers.
- Led the design of all aspects of the tech stack, from infrastructure, front end, back end, and machine learning (ML) strategy (except UI designs).
- Collaborated successfully with a remote distributed team across multiple time zones, using Jira, Slack, and Loom.
Back-end Developer
Sharecare
- Refactored testing and test data for readability and usability. Created a helper library to define data required for a test declaratively, add it to the database, and clean it up afterward.
- Designed and implemented a generation of zip files for user download.
- Redesigned and rolled out access control changes to work with organizational feature requirements and the addition of the organization's related APIs.
DevOps and Full-stack Developer
On Campus Marketing
- Diagnosed issues causing bloated bundle size and reduced react app bundle size by 75%.
- Improved lighthouse score by 50+ for desktop load times through caching and front-end optimization.
- Organized the GitLab CI/CD for deploying microservices and infrastructure changes.
- Created Terraform scripts to manage infrastructure as code (IaC).
- Designed, set up, and managed a per-branch UI preview, allowing QA to go through a branch with front-end changes before merging to a staging environment.
- Provided actionable insights about performance issues with the browser SPA and did some development to implement fixes in this area.
- Managed and set up monitoring and alerts to quickly flag issues affecting customers.
- Implemented OCM's caching strategy. At its core, requests to the server never include user data, which works well for this project and allows CDN to store all results returned from the back-end until code or data changes.
- Observed and fixed several memory leaks in the react application.
Co-founder and Lead Developer | DevOps
UTU Intelligence
- Designed and built a pipeline for ingesting high volumes of user data.
- Managed a production Kubernetes cluster with Terraform. This was the infrastructure behind all the company's development resources.
- Forked and maintained the community Terraform provider for Kubernetes to include pod anti-affinity to support our database hosting.
Freelance Full-stack Developer
Freelance
- Developed an application similar to Pinterest with a focus on affiliate marketing.
- Built an application for internal inventory management. An initial version was done in less than a day, on time, and under budget.
- Maintained and upgraded an application for a medical research lab that worked with patient data.
Experience
React Visual Editor
It's a design tool that works seamlessly with your development processes and eliminates integration work. I'm the only person working on this product, so I wear all the hats.
ML Research
Attempt to generate interesting floor plans, schematic layouts, and efficient box packing.
Built graph neural networks, fully differentiable loss functions, investigating non-gradient descent-based deep learning.
Technical Blog
http://jimmiebtlr.comSome highlights include:
• Setting up Kubernetes zero-downtime deployments with testing.
• Zero loss on the fly expansion of linear layers deep learning.
• Additional posts around deep learning research I've been working on.
Certifications
Terraform Associate
Hashicorp
Deep Learning Nanodegree
Udacity
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, React, PyTorch, OpenAPI, TensorFlow, REST APIs
Tools
Terraform, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, ChatGPT, Jira, Helm, BigQuery
Languages
Go, TypeScript, GraphQL, SQL, Julia, Rust, Python, JavaScript, CSS, HTML
Paradigms
DevOps, Microservices, Continuous Integration (CI), Web Architecture, REST, Testing
Platforms
Kubernetes, Docker, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Firebase, Meteor
Storage
Google Cloud, Elasticsearch, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MongoDB, Redis, MySQL, Cloud Firestore, NoSQL
Frameworks
Material UI, Next.js, Swagger, JSON Web Tokens (JWT)
Other
Cloud, Back-end Development, Full-stack Development, CI/CD Pipelines, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Back-end, OpenAI, Website Performance, GitHub Actions, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Remote Work, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Google Pub/Sub, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), Full-stack, Code Generators, APIs, Distributed Systems, Large Language Models (LLMs), Prompt Engineering, Pinecone
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