I'm a highly motivated software engineer and general problem solver living in Minneapolis, MN. I got started in middle school when I picked up C++ to help development of the popular Half-Life game, Digital Paintball. My passion is developing software that works, without the bells and whistles that get in the way of results.
Sr Technical Operations Engineer @ Lead research and development of global infrastructure automation. From October 2014 to Present (1 year 3 months) Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul AreaIT Consultant @ * Consultant for digital agency, Ready Set Rocket
* Consultant for digital agency, Small Fortune
* Consultant for online poker community, Run It Once
* Consultant for ad agency, Union Park Marketing
* Lead Magento developer for VIZIO.com
* Magento developer for StyleTrek
* Ecommerce developer for Adrenalin Paintball
* Ecommerce developer for Atomix Paintball
* Ecommerce developer for The Paintball Store From 2003 to Present (12 years) Co Owner @ From June 2014 to Present (1 year 7 months) Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul AreaSoftware Engineer @ I worked primarily on performance- and scalability-related issues on the Platform Engineering / DevOps team, who was responsible for driving technology, building and maintaining tooling for the engineering group, and implementing cloud deployment workflows.
* Developed performance & scalability testing tools using Groovy, Scala, Python and Ruby on top of tools including Gatling, Selenium, NewRelic, Splunk, Percona Toolkit, etc
* Monitored, researched and fixed a wide array of performance bottlenecks ranging from MySQL query profiling and JVM tuning to application-level refactoring
* Built tooling to migrate the main databases from field-level encryption to disk-level encryption
* Designed and developed a Job Scheduler Dropwizard service fronting Quartz scheduler in Groovy
* Lead development of the company's Recommendation Dropwizard service in Groovy and Java
* Co-authored a HIPAA-complaint database de-identification tool to allow developers and analysts to use production data locally, developed in Groovy and Gradle.
* Experience working with Jenkins, Fabric, Vagrant, Salt and Chef.
* Worked extensively with AWS services including CloudFormation. From April 2013 to October 2014 (1 year 7 months) Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul AreaSenior Software Engineer @ I worked on the systems architecture and backend development of a CMS fronting a video delivery platform, designing web services that interface with the frontend application layer and other platform (Java/.NET) components.
* Co-lead development of all backend components for the Broadband Division
* Migrated code repositories from SVN to Git
* Introduced Git branching workflow, code reviews (via GitHub), continuous integration using Phing and Jenkins, better documentation processes, and assisted the enhancement of agile/SCRUM methodologies
* Introduced tooling for executing common development and maintenance tasks from command-line
* Introduced logging for profiling and monitoring of production environments; debugging in development
* Developed the backend services for an asynchronous portal framework that powers the frontend app UI based on JSR-286
* Designed and developed a flexible schema, persistence-agnostic, fully-versioned storage service integrated with jBPM allowing the application to be custom tailored to customer needs; original prototype was developed using MongoDB, later integrated with MySQL.
* Wrote the specs document for all web service API's offered through the application; implemented for the Portal, Content, Auth and UI Translation REST API's
* Managed the maintenance of the team build / CI server
* Created standard dev environment tooling using Puppet and Vagrant
* Managed the Broadband Division GitHub organization account and repositories From April 2011 to March 2013 (2 years) Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul AreaLead Developer @ I worked as the principal developer for the company, managing day-to-day operation of all things web and mobile development and was deeply involved in a project's life cycle from proposal to on-going maintenance.
* Assisted creation and delivery of proposals and determined scope under strict budget constraints
* Acted as a technical project manager on most development-related projects
* Architected and directed development of a private wholesale e-commerce platform using Zend Framework
* Lead a distributed Magento development team for VIZIO
* Developed dozens of Wordpress, Drupal and ExpressionEngine websites ranging from simple company websites to multi-tenant organizational portals
* Architected and developed a web CMS using Zend Framework
* Managed all company and client servers; both on Debian-based Amazon EC2 instances and RedHat/CentOS dedicated servers
* Introduced the company Software Development Life Cycle, Git, automated deployments and a number of other development processes and standards
* Developed numerous internal tools using a variety of languages like Python, Ruby, Java, PHP and Bash
* Guided performance and scaling projects leveraging technologies such as RRDTool/Cacti, Memcached and Varnish
* Started and managed the mobile iOS and Android development team From January 2009 to March 2011 (2 years 3 months) Orlando, Florida AreaProgram Advisor, Web Design & Development Bachelor Program @ I participated semiannually as part of the Program Advisory Board to observe, review and advise the University of its degree program's structure, relevance, depth and ability to produce high demand graduates. From December 2008 to December 2010 (2 years 1 month) Developer @ I was hired as a full stack developer and spent most of my time working on a social network. Hydra later rebranded to Purple, Rock, Scissors.
* Lead a team of four developing a social network; responsible for the file system, search, ORM and CAS authentication layers
* Developed a 360 peer review application using CakePHP
* Introduced password management tools for individuals and company accounts From October 2007 to December 2008 (1 year 3 months) Contributor @ I was one of the many people on the development team for the popular Half-Life and Half-Life 2 modification, Digital Paintball. My roles over the years touched everything from 2D and 3D art, to C++ game mechanics development, web development of league tables and global player stats databases (PHP, PostgreSQL), to leading community administration. From 1999 to 2006 (7 years)
Bachelor, Entertainment Business @ Full Sail University From 2007 to 2007 Associate, Digital Media @ Full Sail University From 2005 to 2006 Rob Zienert is skilled in: Bread, Butter, Combat, Git, MySQL, JavaScript, Web Development, Python, Software Development, Zend Framework, Scrum, CSS, Software Engineering, Bash, Software Project Management