Afrael Ortiz

Project DeLorean (Master Tax Engine) integration implementation, PTS (Payroll Tax Summary) and RTS (Return Transmission File) Export File Modules, Guardians (Data Guard Rails) project and Agency Management Service

• Led High-Performing Teams: Managed 2 SCRUM teams (up to 16 engineers) fostering a culture of growth. Conducted regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and facilitated career development. Successfully mentored and promoted 2 engineers to technical leadership roles. Identified knowledge gaps and created talent development plans to bridge them.
• Delivered Business-Critical Solutions: Led the development of a distributed export service (C#, MongoDB, RabbitMQ) enabling efficient processing of millions of employee data points and billions in transactions between payroll and tax platforms.
• Improved Efficiency and Customer Satisfaction: Implemented services with data validations that decreased customer support cases and cost-to-serve by 80%.
• Agile Leader: As a Certified SCRUM Master I used agile principles to identify roadblocks and risks. Created data visualizations (throughput, cycle time, velocity, burndown charts) to track progress and implemented mitigation strategies. Defined succession plans to ensure project continuity.
• Strong Collaboration: Partnered with product and engineering teams to strategize feature planning, ensuring technical feasibility and alignment with customer needs and value.
• Elevated Engineering Practices: Ensured adherence to company SaaS standards through code reviews, defined SLAs/SLOs, and implemented automated pipelines with alerting (GitHub Actions, SonarQube, MS Teams) for improved quality control.
• Increased Automation: Streamlined workflows by automating ticket creation (using Python, Jira, TeamCity) and scheduled alerts (using Python, PagerDuty, TeamCity, MSTeams).
• Knowledge Management: Created a centralized team documentation repository in Confluence for easy access to processes and engineering best practices.

UTE (Ultimate Tax Engine) Implementation, Filing Generation System, Banking, Filing and Year End functional areas

• Collaborated with cross-functional teams: Aligned technology roadmap with product vision by collaborating with a 10-member development team and fostered a culture of continuous learning by setting learning goals with engineers and promoting code quality initiatives.
• Mentored and Onboarded Team Members: Conducted regular 1:1s to support technical growth and quality goals, focusing on mentoring and onboarding junior engineers.
• Delivered High-Impact Solutions: Led the development of a C#, SQL Server, RabbitMQ service that reduced tax filing generation time by 98.5% for every million employees, significantly improving efficiency. Also implemented a suite of services (year-end filing, bank transaction and ACH creation, disk access isolation) using C#, SQL Server, RabbitMQ, leveraging Domain-Driven Design and message/event-driven architecture for scalability and maintainability.
• Technical Leadership and Innovation: Championed the migration of a monolithic application to a microservices architecture, enabling horizontal scaling and improved performance. Developed a CLI utility to automate documentation generation based on Git commits, streamlining knowledge sharing.

AutoNation InHouse CRM Stabilization, CRM Phase II and CRM Phase III projects

• Implemented development and design guidelines for any new feature that would be added to the project.
• Participate in code reviews and ensure quality of the code that is being added or updated to the project.
• Determine development tasks and estimations, on an individual and team basis.
• Lead all stabilization efforts to accomplish company wide adoption of new updated CRM system.
• Lead daily stand-up meetings and also participate with business/product owner meetings to establish and proritize tasks and or user stories that will be released per sprint/release.
• Communicate in understandable software terms with the business or product owners about the complexity and risks involved with the requested features.
• Technical challenges currenly being addressed are: memory leaks in AngularJS, optimization of code to ensure performance, measure and log activities through AppInsights to visualize progress, minimize technical debt, refactoring of initial code.
• Minimize browser crashes and unexpected errors, also, guarantee cross-browser compatibility.
• Inspect previous code base to determine migration efforts.
• Document changes per release.
• Participate in the interview process when recruiting new team members.
• The technologies involved are JavaScript, C#, AngularJS, SignalR, WEB.API, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Services.

Designed, architected and implemented a notification and alert service

• A plugin-based service that delivers notifications and alerts through different mediums.
• Implemented an email plugin, native mobile notification plugin, in-app notification plugin and texting plugin.
• Engine based on MEF (Microsoft Extensibility Framework).
• Create a services layer exposed through a secure REST API.
• The technologies involved are AngularJS, SignalR, WEB.API, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Services and Microsoft Extensibility Framework.

Participated in the AutoNation CRM system technology update project

• Update existing ASP, ASP.NET and SOAP Web Services to an AngularJS based app through a RESTful API.
• Create a services layer exposed through a secure REST API.
• Designed and implemented a web based texting feature, present in the mobile app, using SignalR.
• The technologies involved are AngularJS, SignalR, WEB.API, Microsoft SQL Server.

Designed, architected and implemented a mobile app client of our homegrown AutoNation CRM system

• Cross-platform mobile application.
• Create a services layer exposed through a secure REST API.
• Created a texting feature using third-party technologies, SignalR for near-realtime updates and Azure to push cross-platform native notifications.
• Technically achieving this through the use of WEB.API, Xamarin.Forms, SignalR, Azure among other technologies.

All of the following apps were retired from the iTunes AppStore: TinyLingua, Bilingual Preschool Learning Activities

• Use of cocos2d framework. Spritesheets, Particles and UIGestureRecognizers
• Custom animations, custom classes, singletons and a sequenced audio
• Integration of five learning levels and three games
• Twitter and Facebook integration
• Universal app

TinyLingua, Baby Learning Phone

• Use of cocos2d framework. Spritesheets, Particles and UIGestureRecognizers
• Custom animations, custom classes, singletons and a sequenced audio
• Integration of five learning levels, three games and a finger paint section
• Use of In-App purchases to deliver unlocked content

AutoNation Payroll, Pricing and Vehicle Stock In Projects

• Proprietary Payroll system, handles all payroll calculations for the AN related sales personnel.
• Proprietary Pricing system, handles all pricing tiers for all new vehicle in inventory.
• Proprietary Vehicle Stock-In system, handles the stock in of all new vehicles, invoices and GL calculations.
• Task based SharePoint application to handle quick requests, be able to track and follow up on the created tasks.
• Maintenance tasks on our current CRM system.

Bayview Asset Management SharePoint Enhancements & Integration Project

• Upgrades to SharePoint infrastructure to guarantee high availability
• Integrated SharePoint with Microsoft SSRS, Microsoft PerformancePoint and BusinessObjects XI

RTAM (Real Time Advertising Monitor) Software Package

• Addressed several serious database issues in legacy version. Optimized queries and joins to achieve faster performance
• Reengineered the application to a more industry standard MVC paradigm.
• Created a data process that converted data from a MySQL database into a Firebird embedded database
• Generated over 50K dollars in additional sales thanks to code fixes and code optimization

Framework Application Development Team, Miami, Florida

• Created a new validation library using regular expressions recipes.
• Exposed data through a WCF/REST interface.
• Optimized code through refactoring to accommodate better software patterns.
• Created a security model that hides sensitive information through the use of variable substitution.

Assurant Specialty Property Licensing Application, Miami Florida and Toronto, Canada.

• Integrated third party applications/vendors through the use of XML Web Services.
• Published functionality to third party applications/vendors also using web services.
• Used LinqToObjects for smart and quick creation of sets of data.
• Created batch process using plug-ins, based on proprietary libraries developed at Assurant.
• Extended use of unit tests for a continuous development-test-deployment cycle.

Assurant Specialty Property Cash Data Warehouse Online Treasury Application, Miami, Florida

• Created and implemented use cases, gathered information, object relation diagrams and sequence.
• Created and maintained stored procedures, function, packages and customs data migration PL/SQL scripts.
• Integrated with third party systems via web services, FTP, Mainframe Datasets and flat files.
• Designed and created web page layouts that support localization for international users.
• Created unit tests to verify the integrity of the business objects that are part of the system.