Joshua Schniper

joshua@schniper.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
  • Node
  • C#
  • 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 nearly 20 years of experience across a broad swath of technology

The Timeline

Incentivize Health (Oct 2023 - Now)

I left BUILT in order to start working with my old boss from ChipRewards on a new startup. The goal was to recapture some of the magic from the olds days and see if we could make it all work again. This was the first time in my career where I truly got to do it all myself.

VP of Engineering

I've been responsible for just about every aspect on the engineering side of the house. I got to choose the tech stack, define the architecture, setup the infrastructure, and write a lot of code. I also lead a very small development team.

BUILT (Nov 2022 - Oct 2023)

After leaving Icario, I went to work for BUILT, which offered development consulting services to clients across a wide variety of industries

Senior Software Engineer

I mainly worked as an individual contributor on consulting projects and some internal skunk works projects.

  • Helped lay the groundwork for an internal telemetry application that was going to be used to collect and aggregate metrics, tracing and log data from other applications that were in development
  • Worked as an individual contributor on several client projects across a variety of tech stacks
  • Aided in the defining the architecture for the internal tech stack

Icario (Jun 2021 - Nov 2022)

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.