Joe is available for hire
Hire JoeJoe Cavazos
Verified Expert in Engineering
Back-end Developer
Houston, TX, United States
Toptal member since June 19, 2016
Bio
Joe is a principal Java developer and architect with over 14 years of experience developing enterprise and small-scale applications, primarily written in Spring Boot. He has experience at all stages of the SDLC and is well-versed in relational databases, application servers, REST APIs, unit testing, and AWS.
Portfolio
GameFace
Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS SDK, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)...
International Trip Planning Services
Jenkins, Unix, JUnit, REST APIs, Hibernate, JBoss Seam, Java, Back-end...
Okta - Main
Java, React, Spring Boot, Go, Vue, Node.js, Express.js, C#.NET, Kotlin, Python...
Experience
- Back-end - 14 years
- Hibernate - 14 years
- Java - 14 years
- MySQL - 14 years
- REST APIs - 12 years
- REST - 12 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 10 years
- Spring Boot - 8 years
Availability
Full-time
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Unix, JUnit, REST APIs, SQL, Hibernate, Java, Back-end, Git, Spring Boot
The most amazing...
...thing I've coded is a homebrew streaming media server that broadcasts videos to viewers and incorporates a video catalog, queue, and scheduled programming.
Work Experience
Back-end Developer via Toptal
2020 - PRESENT
GameFace
- Developed and maintained several integrated Spring Boot applications in a microservice architecture, communicating between services using REST APIs.
- Integrated a back end with payment processing and collection services like PayPal.
- Implemented authentication using OAuth 2.0 and eventually with Amazon Cognito.
- Participated in architectural design sessions and discussions. Provided feedback and direction for high-level design decisions and considerations.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS SDK, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Java, Git, GitHub, AWS CloudFormation, REST, REST APIs, Spring, Spring Boot, JUnit, Discord, OAuth 2, OAuth, SQL, PostgreSQL, Liquibase, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, Automated Testing
Software Developer / Architect
2010 - PRESENT
International Trip Planning Services
- Implemented extensive data modeling around flights, trips, aircraft, passengers, and more.
- Used Java reflections to create an automated framework for stamping/filling PDF, Word, Excel, and plain text templates.
- Provided REST API endpoints for customers to upload trip data.
- Implemented REST and SOAP services for transmitting data to government agencies.
- Generated PDFs from scratch using a combination of JSF templating and iText.
- Architectured design decisions and implementation.
Technologies: Jenkins, Unix, JUnit, REST APIs, Hibernate, JBoss Seam, Java, Back-end, Apache Maven, Git, JSF, Seam, MySQL, JBoss, Amazon Web Services (AWS), WildFly, Microservices, RESTful Microservices, Microservices Architecture, CSS, Amazon EC2, Automated Testing
Okta Developer
2024 - 2025
Okta - Main
- Updated the OAuth and OIDC settings in various projects to use a new authorization scope.
- Updated the list of dependencies in projects across various frameworks and languages to the available, with appropriate refactoring.
- Updated and refined documentation of existing repositories.
Technologies: Java, React, Spring Boot, Go, Vue, Node.js, Express.js, C#.NET, Kotlin, Python, PHP, OAuth 2, OAuth, SAML 2.0, SAML, OpenID, OpenID Connect (OIDC)
Technical Writer, Java
2020 - 2024
Okta
- Delivered a blog post on integrating the Okta identity provider (IDP) with R2DBC in Spring Boot applications.
- Completed another blog post on integrating Okta IDP with Spring Cloud Config in Spring Boot applications.
- Wrote a blog post on integrating Okta IDP with SAML-based authentication in Spring Boot applications using relational databases.
Technologies: Writing & Editing, Java, OAuth, OAuth 2
Senior Java Developer
2022 - 2022
Phennecs, LLC
- Developed a high-performance Java web application (Spring Boot) that backs up and restores customer data in SalesForce by interfacing with the SalesForce API and writing to/reading from Apache Hive tables.
- Designed and implemented complicated logic to restore previously backed up SalesForce data involving dependent/child objects.
- Re-architected the application to break certain processes into atomic parts, so long-running processes can be stopped and restarted at arbitrary times, greatly facilitating the upgrading of customers to new versions.
- Wrote unit and integration tests for several Spring Boot applications where previously there was zero test coverage.
- Participated in high-level architectural design discussions for complicated business processes.
Technologies: Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, AsyncTask, Apache Maven, Unit Testing, PostgreSQL, Integration Testing, Multithreading, Hibernate, Git, Kubernetes, Salesforce, Streaming Data, OAuth, Salesforce API
Senior Software Developer/Architect via Toptal
2020 - 2020
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield
- Managed a team of overseas engineers and mentored on best coding practices and writing effective tests.
- Coordinated production deployment of various services, including QA checks.
- Participated in high-level design discussions and architectural reviews.
Technologies: Java
Senior Software Developer via Toptal
2018 - 2020
Priceline
- Developed an airline pricing aggregator using Spring Boot. The application would query a number of different sources for typical air itineraries using a multithreaded architecture and compile the results for human consumption.
- Maintained several legacy Java applications, responding to outages, diagnosing errors, and implementing critical fixes.
- Developed and implemented messaging architecture using Apache Kafka.
Technologies: Java, Git, DevOps, SQL, REST, Spring, Spring Boot, Apache Kafka, Kafka Streams, JUnit, Spring MVC, Automated Testing
Software Engineer IV
2017 - 2018
Mitratech
- Collaborated across teams to implement a new REST API endpoint for web applications.
- Mentored junior developers on good coding practices and writing automated tests.
- Taught the development team to write unit tests using JUnit and Mockito.
- Used AppDynamics to identify several inefficient processes and propose methods for improvement.
- Refactored memory-inefficient Hibernate queries to use pagination and scrollable results.
Technologies: JUnit, REST APIs, Hibernate, Java, Back-end, REST, Git, JavaScript, Jakarta Server Pages (JSP), Oracle SQL, Spring, Automated Testing
Software Developer
2013 - 2017
Apptio, Inc.
- Developed for and maintained an internal deployment tool written in Java.
- Created an internal Java application that collected availability metrics of customer instances and correlated this data with support tickets.
- Built an internal Java application to manage security (via LDAP) for customer instances.
- Implemented authentication for a web application using role assumption with AWS.
- Leveraged AWS APIs to retrieve customers' AWS usage data and feed it into Apptio's flagship application for aggregation and metrics.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Unix, JUnit, REST APIs, Java, Back-end, LDAP, REST, MySQL, TeamCity, Gradle, Mercurial, Git, Jakarta Server Pages (JSP), Groovy, Amazon EC2, Automated Testing
Experience
Heavy Reading Barbell and Book Club
A facetious WordPress blog with AI-generated posts authored by gym stereotypes. The posts are a mix of book reviews and fitness advice that is given knowing it will be ignored.
The business logic is written in Java and executed in AWS. There is a periodic SQS trigger that invokes a lambda function. This function selects a random prompt and queries the OpenAI API to generate a book review. The lambda parses the response from OpenAI, packages it into a WordPress post, and then publishes that post to a designated WordPress instance using the WordPress REST API.
The business logic is written in Java and executed in AWS. There is a periodic SQS trigger that invokes a lambda function. This function selects a random prompt and queries the OpenAI API to generate a book review. The lambda parses the response from OpenAI, packages it into a WordPress post, and then publishes that post to a designated WordPress instance using the WordPress REST API.
TSDBot: A Java-based Discord Chat Bot
https://github.com/schoolyd/tsdbot2This project is a chatbot for Discord written in Java. It has several features:
1. Easily-extensible array of "functions" ranging from trivial (e.g., replacing some of the text in a previous message and returning the result) to more complicated (e.g., picking a random line from the chat history and sending it in a tweet to the community manager of the video game developer Bungie)
2. Integration with AWS, specifically S3 and EC2
3. Via Dropwizard, implements an embedded Jetty server for serving HTTP requests, including a navigable website
4. Implements streaming, broadcasting media service integrated with the Discord chat and the hosted website. This service is modeled on a "job polling" framework, where the streaming media are stored on separate machines alongside a standalone "agent" executable JAR. This agent sends periodic heartbeats to the Discord bot, communicating which videos it has available. The Discord bot can display this video catalog to users. If a user wants to play any video, the Discord bot will place a "job" in its queue for the specific agent, and the next time the agent sends a heartbeat, it will receive the "play this video" job and will begin streaming the video
1. Easily-extensible array of "functions" ranging from trivial (e.g., replacing some of the text in a previous message and returning the result) to more complicated (e.g., picking a random line from the chat history and sending it in a tweet to the community manager of the video game developer Bungie)
2. Integration with AWS, specifically S3 and EC2
3. Via Dropwizard, implements an embedded Jetty server for serving HTTP requests, including a navigable website
4. Implements streaming, broadcasting media service integrated with the Discord chat and the hosted website. This service is modeled on a "job polling" framework, where the streaming media are stored on separate machines alongside a standalone "agent" executable JAR. This agent sends periodic heartbeats to the Discord bot, communicating which videos it has available. The Discord bot can display this video catalog to users. If a user wants to play any video, the Discord bot will place a "job" in its queue for the specific agent, and the next time the agent sends a heartbeat, it will receive the "play this video" job and will begin streaming the video
TSDTV.java
https://github.com/schoolyd/tsdbot2This code represents the "controller" class for a broadcasting video service integrated with a Discord chatbot I wrote and maintained. It allows for asynchronous playback of streaming media selected by the user.
Education
2005 - 2010
Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering
Rice University - Houston, Texas, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, FFmpeg, iText, Quartz, Liquibase, AsyncTask, Salesforce API, WordPress API, React, Vue, Node.js, OpenID
Tools
WildFly, Jenkins, Git, IntelliJ IDEA, Apache Maven, Gradle, Mercurial, TeamCity, AWS SDK, Kafka Streams, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), GitHub, AWS CloudFormation, ChatGPT
Languages
Java, SQL, Groovy, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bash, Go, C#.NET, Kotlin, Python, PHP, SAML
Frameworks
Spring Boot, JUnit, JBoss Seam, Hibernate, TestNG, Spring, Mockito, Spring MVC, Jakarta Server Pages (JSP), JavaServer Faces, JSF, Seam, Thymeleaf, Vaadin, OAuth 2, Express.js
Paradigms
Unit Testing, Automated Testing, REST, Object-oriented Design (OOD), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Microservices, Microservices Architecture, DevOps
Storage
MySQL, JSON, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), JBoss AS, Oracle SQL, PostgreSQL
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), JBoss, Unix, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, Windows, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, Salesforce
Other
Back-end, Writing & Editing, APIs, LDAP, Amazon API Gateway, RESTful Microservices, Discord, OAuth, Integration Testing, Multithreading, Streaming Data, OpenAI, SAML 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC)
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