Joshua Schniper

joshua.schniper@gmail.com
1.205.937.1524
jschniper

About Me

One of my favorite authors is Kurt Vonnegut. I've got a dachshund named Neville and I will show you a picture of him at the drop of a hat.

Things I Love

  • Vim
  • Elixir
  • Postgres
  • Linux
  • K8s
  • Functional Languages
  • Calvin and Hobbes
  • Cycling

Things I Use

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Javascript
  • Typescript
  • Go
  • Ruby
  • Java
  • React
  • SQL
  • Git
  • Erlang
  • Zsh
  • GraphQL
  • and more...

Things I Hate

  • Cycling

Education

Hampden-Sydney College

English / 2003 - 2007

At A High Level

An engineering lead with 15 years of experience across a broad swath of technology

The Timeline

Icario (Jun 2021 - Now)

Icario acquired ChipRewards in June of 2021. Icario is a healthcare technology company that focuses on gaps in care for CMS programs.

Senior Director of Engineering

Engineering leader responsible for teams in Birmingham and Minneapolis.

  • Helped coordinate the migration from several legacy platforms onto a new consolidated platform
  • Worked with others in senior leadership to make sure that priorities were consistent within the organization
  • Managed 12-15 employees and worked to retain them during a period of very high turnover

ChipRewards (Jun 2011 - Jun 2021)

ChipRewards was a healthcare technology company that initially focused on incentive programs in the commercial healthcare space and expanded into running similar programs in the Medicaid and Medicare space. I started as employee number 9 or 10 and by the time of the acquisition we had over 60 employees. Given the small size, I wore a number of different hats including:

Senior Developer & Team Lead

Manager for a small team that was focused on the ChipRewards member portal. This application started as a Ruby on the Rails application that experienced several major upgrades over the years. Finally, we decided to rewrite the existing application using Elixir with a React frontend and GraphQL at the API layer. The migration was a major success; we were able to provide the same basic functionality while cleaning up the major technical debt and providing a much better foundation for new feature development.

My general responsibilities in this role included:

  • Managing the roadmap and development priorities to make sure they align with the business needs while also working with the development team to handle technical debt and improve processes
  • Tracking down requirements and making sure everything was ready for the development team
  • Mentoring younger developers and providing them with the type of the work that allowed them room to grow
  • Managing team priorities across several competing clients and projects

Cloud Engineer

The AWS Years (2018 - Now)

Generally responsible for setting up and maintaining our AWS environment. I lead the charge on moving from Rackspace to AWS, which included:

  • Migrating several large Postgres databases while minimizing impact to live programs
  • Building several Kubernetes clusters and setting up live "replicas" of our existing environments to provide for a near seamless cutover
  • Ensuring that existing integrations with clients and third party vendors weren't disrupted and data processing continued with minimal interruption
  • Replacing our existing CI/CD process to leverage Terraform
The Rackspace Years (2011 - Now)

I fell into the responsibility of maintaining our cloud servers and improving the process so that the onboarding of new clients was less odious. This work included:

  • Containerization of all of the applications and the setup of the CI/CD processes
  • Developing the procedure for provisioning new servers using Ansible to provide standard baseline configurations with alarming and monitoring baked in and a path for easy upgrades

Naia Corporation (2010 - 2011)

Naia offered software development outsourcing and consulting to small businesses in the Birmingham area

Front End Developer

I focused mainly on cleanup of existing client applications and worked on modernizing the front end technology stack away from Silverlight towards modern HTML, JS and CSS. I was also embedded with a client for a prolonged period to help launch a mobile browser application that interfaced with their existing web services.

Insercorp (2008 - 2010)

Insercorp built and maintained small business websites.

Full Stack Developer

I was responsible for several new client implementations as well as new modules for the proprietary CMS used by Insercorp.