Douglas J. Heitkamp
Career Summary
Over seventeen years of experience as a Software Engineer. Over fourteen years of experience as a technical leader. Experienced in web development, Java,MarkLogic, XQuery, XML,Web Services, and Big Data.Areas of Expertise(Years of Experience)
Languages- Java/J2EE (13)
- XQuery (9)
- Python (0.5)
- C++ (2)
- VB Script (3)
- JavaScript (14)
- C# (1)
- XML (14)
- XSD (6)
- SOAP (6)
- WSDL (6)
- XSLT (3)
- DTD (2)
- RELAX NG (1)
- JSON (2)
- MarkLogic (9)
- Eclipse (10)
- WSAD (3)
- TFS (4)
- ClearCase (10)
- SourceSafe (3)
- Ant (1)
- Anthill Pro (1)
- Technical Leadership (14)
- Web Services / REST (14)
- Agile Process (8)
- Search Relevance (7)
- UML (2)
- Design Patterns (2)
Experience
March 2000 - Present / LexisNexis / Miamisburg, OHSr. Consulting Software Engineer (April 2016 – Present)
- Designed and implemented a machine learning platform that supports an evolving lifecycle of data collectors, model generators, and “offline” value analysis. Acted as a Product Owner on an agile team for this technical capability. Designed and implemented data collectors using an Elasticsearch database to support advanced analysis and reporting.
- Evolved Lexis’s Search A/B test framework to support fine-grained alterations to relevance algorithms and added flexibility to user selection logic.
- Designed and implemented a reusable test framework for collecting, compiling, and computing results on expert-judged relevance assessments.
- Worked with a team of engineers on a PoCto replace MarkLogic with Elasticsearch.
Consulting Software Engineer (August 2008 – April 2016)
- Assisted in the architecture of the content search and retrieve infrastructure components that support Lexis’s latest product offerings, including traditional online products, mobile applications, and integrated applications deployed at customer locations.
- Responsible for engineering responses and effort sizing for product requirements. Assisted product teams with refining requirements. Proactively proposed product features that product teams may not have realized were possible. Prototyped features for plausibility, demonstration, and/or response time/capacity costs.
- Technical Lead for Search Relevance. Responsible for writing and tuning search algorithms. Created a tool for automation of algorithm testing and results reporting. Participated in root-cause analysis, which determined the reasons why some queries did not produce the desired outcomes. This process created product requirements that were turned into the business for review and prioritization.
- Lead, trained, consulted, and motivated engineering teams of two to twelve full time employees and on-site contractors. Responsible for dividing tasks, cross-training team members, and team deadlines. Coordinated work with cross-functional teams. Advised architecture councils with placement of function decisions, which typically involved tough decisions between architectural debt vs time to market trade-offs.
- Designed, wrote, and maintained Java servers and parsing grammars for user-entered query strings. The Java servers supported requests for all search REST resources. Performed many of the major life-cycle management functions using agile methods. Personally took care of high severity and high visibility release issues.
- Designed, wrote, maintained, and tuned XQuery on MarkLogic to search almost 2 billion documents.
- Tuned and supported search logic on a 300 node MarkLogic cluster that is designed to handle over 75,000 search requests per hour and 500,000 query auto-complete requests per hour with 99.8% reliability in a high-availability environment with a disaster-recovery back-up cluster.
- Co-Presented “Effective XQuery in MarkLogic” at the 2011 MarkLogic User Conference.
- Wrote numerous engineering support tools and test clients that sped up the creation and maintenance of over 5,000 unit tests and enabled quicker defect triage which dramatically improved software quality.
- Recognized for outstanding performance on several occasions. Awarded “Master of Innovation” (individual), “Highest Performing Team” (team), and “Best Save” (individual). Consistently receive top scores on annual reviews.
Sr. Software Engineer (March 2003 – August 2008)
- Four years of Technical Leadership experience, including two projects with more than $1 Million in development funding. Team sizes ranged from two to eight full-time engineers. Gained quicker time-to-market and increased customer satisfaction by leading projects using agile methods.
- Assisted in building the architecture, design, and implementation of three Web Services products which are used internally to meet strategic initiatives and sold externally to tech-savvy clients who integrate the LexisNexis information and search engine into their own products and services.
Software Engineer (March 2000 – March 2003)
- Responsible for life-cycle management and support for three LexisNexis software products, which are responsible for over $5 Million in annual revenue.
- Technical liaison for sales representatives to assist with solution strategies and to showcase LexisNexis’ technical prowess in the Web Services arena.
- Designed, developed, tested, and maintained various small web applications written using ASP, C#, DHTML, and Ajax that were used to gain market share and improve client retention.
September 1996 - March 2000 / International TechneGroup Inc. / Milford, OH
Software Engineer /Co-op
- Initiated, designed, and implemented a reusable corporate intranet site for project collaboration and document management that integrated directly with Microsoft Project. This project was later named and marketed as ProjectView.
- Installed and maintained ProjectView software on offsite servers in Japan (Hitachi Koki) and Korea (Orion), with rigorous security, including IP filtering and SSL certificate mapping.