Rich Whitsell

About Rich Whitsell

Senior Platform Engineer with additional experience as a Senior or Lead Software Engineer and a Senior Site Reliability Engineer.What drives me is eliminating toil and waste and empowering people to do better work, hopefully leading them to greater impact and enjoying their work more. Leveraging AI while providing guardrails is a particularly interesting challenge.Things I\'ve done:• I\'ve coded from the microcontroller level up to large, distributed, scalable, back-end systems.• Taken ownership of and re-architected critical applications.• Built secure, resilient AWS infrastructure (Golang, Terraform).• Designed normalized relational databases (Postgres, MySQL, Oracle).• Designed denormalized, partitioned relational databases for event processing (AWS Aurora RDS).• Used distributed NoSQL databases for highly scalable persistence (AWS DynamoDB, CouchBase, Cassandra).• Used distributed caches to reduce latency in services (Redis, Hazelcast).• Developed database integration code (Java, Hibernate, JPA, JDBC, Spring Data, Akka, Golang).• Developed REST services (Java, Spring Boot, Golang).• Set up CI/CD systems such as Jenkins, GoCD, and GitLab pipelines.• Fixed and enhanced Java-based image-processing software (Java, AWT, Swing, threading).• Collaborated and communicated with technical and non-technical people alike.

Experience

1. Senior Platform Engineer

   Korn Ferry

   Apr 2025 — Present · Tucson, AZ, US

   Working with a client of Korn Ferry as a consultant on the Platform Engineering team. Plenty of Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, and Azure. Automating the tedious and repetitive, and designing and building self-service solutions in support of software development teams. Implementation of AI Agentic solutions in support of software engineers and simplifying interactions with Terraform projects.

Education

• University of Arizona

  Computer Science

• University of Oklahoma

  Electrical Engineering

Skills

• Tomcat
• Oracle
• Unix
• Cloud Computing
• Problem Solving
• Junit
• Server Side Programming
• Java Enterprise Edition
• Enterprise Software
• Integration
• Docker
• Ehcache
• Amazon Web Services (Aws)
• Software Design
• Jquery
• Web Applications
• Mobile Applications
• Distributed Systems
• Spring Boot
• Gradle
• J2ee
• Postgresql
• Software Development
• Nosql
• Javaserver Pages (Jsp)
• Software Engineering
• Redis
• Spring
• Databases
• Team Leadership
• Object Oriented Design
• Consulting
• Angularjs
• Shell Scripting
• Ant
• Agile Methodologies
• Scala
• Spring Framework
• Database Design
• Rest