Brian Lawler

About Brian Lawler

I\'ve been architecting and building great software products for over 25 years. I started out programming in C in 1993, then on to C++ in 1997, Java in and most recently moved on to Scala in 2011. Along the way I have continued to hone my skills as a Systems Architect, designing working architectures both for big companies and small startups. I believe strongly in the virtues of using Domain Driven Design to map out what a system does before digging into the details of how the system does it. I also believe in the value of creating visuals that help people (both technical and non-technical) understand how the system works.I prefer designing and building back end web applications in Scala, and I have deep experience in using AWS to deploy and manage those applications.

Experience

1. Staff Software Engineer

   Evolent

   Aug 2024 — Present · Alexandria, VA, US

   In the summer of 2024, Machinify (my employer at the time) spun off one of their lines of business and sold it to Evolent. I was a part of that transaction and joined Evolent to support that product. The goal of the first 100 days of this transaction was to integrate Machinify\'s Prior Authorization product called Patriot into Evolent\'s existing product suite. We were able to accomplish this on schedule and re-launch Patriot as \"Auth Intelligence\" in the Evolent suite, and at this point we are processing thousands of claims through our AI-powered system.As part of this transition, my main role was to add new productivity features requested by Evolent\'s end users and to create a new process for loading Policy Guidelines into the Auth Intelligence system. The new process was necessary because of Evolent\'s aggressive plans to integrate and scale Auth Intelligence into their product offering. As a result, we had to augment Machinify\'s existing Policy Authoring process with a more scalable approach spread across a larger team. Getting more Policies into the system was critical to being able to process more claims through it. Using my knowledge of the internals of Patriot and working with Subject Matter Experts who would ultimately be using this process, I defined a more formal process for turning our Policy Guidelines into a machine-readable format in MSWord, then wrote the code to transform those Word documents into Auth Intelligence Policies. By using Word as the data entry tool instead of the homegrown Machinify Policy Authoring Tool, we were able to significantly speed up the process of getting Policies into the system, reducing total data entry time from up to a week down to just a few minutes. What began as a small one-off script for automating the data entry task has now turned into a load bearing part of the overall Policy maintenance process as these hundreds of policies need to be updated yearly.

Education

• Northwestern University

  B.S., Electrical Engineering

  1989 — 1993

Skills

• Agile Methodologies
• Software Engineering
• Mysql
• Project Delivery
• Web Applications
• Cloud Computing
• Java
• Scala
• Internet Software Development
• Technical Architecture
• Application Architecture
• Consulting
• Databases
• Architectures
• Mobile Devices
• Play Framework
• Management Consulting
• Saas
• System Architecture
• Solution Architecture
• Endorsements
• Start-Ups
• Architecture