Dennis Williams

Owned backend services for Shure’s audio device ecosystem, including firmware update delivery and device registration flows handling ~50K requests/day. Migrated legacy SOAP endpoints to RESTful JSON APIs in Spring Boot, reducing average response latency from ~850 ms to ~200 ms during peak usage. Collaborated with embedded engineers to implement MQTT-based device communication protocols for real-time telemetry collection. Built automated deployment pipelines using GitHub Actions and Ansible, cutting release cycles from two weeks to under three days across four environments. Instrumented services with Datadog APM and structured logging, improving mean time to resolution to under 25 minutes. Expanded integration testing by adding ~120 test cases, reducing regression defects by ~35%, and mentored three junior engineers on API design and debugging.

Designed and built ASP.NET Core APIs for a pharmacy benefits management platform covering member eligibility, drug formulary lookups, and prior authorization workflows across a database of 3+ million members. Led migration of a legacy reporting service to .NET 6 on Azure App Service, cutting peak response time from 4.8s to under 1.2s. Partnered with product and a team of engineers to rewrite the member portal in React and ASP.NET Web API, reducing load time from 6s to under 1.5s. Introduced event-driven integration using Azure Service Bus between the claims engine and downstream pharmacy network, reducing data latency by ~80% and removing synchronous polling bottlenecks. Owned Terraform-based Azure infrastructure for multiple environments, improved eligibility query performance with read replicas and EF changes, set up GitHub Actions CI/CD for microservices to enable multiple daily releases, and implemented OAuth2 and role-based access control for API security.

Led backend development for the course enrollment and billing microservice processing 100K+ transactions daily across 180+ countries. Rebuilt a Django monolith into Spring Boot microservices to enable independent scaling during flash sales. Implemented OAuth2 and JWT authentication across 30+ internal APIs, strengthening authorization and removing access-control vulnerabilities. Designed a real-time analytics pipeline in Python and Kafka with sub-10-second lag. Improved read-heavy performance by adding MySQL read replicas (up to ~3x on peak enrollment). Established API versioning conventions and documentation standards, reducing design review cycles by about a week per feature. Automated database migrations with Flyway and Ansible, eliminating manual DBA steps. Served as on-call lead for the payments stack during major platform events, coordinating incident response and post-mortems.