Principal Software Engineer: Backend, Java, Databases

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Principal Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience delivering enterprise-grade solutions at industry leaders like Salesforce and VMware, as well as start-ups. Specializes in Java, relational databases, service-oriented architectures, and data infrastructure, with current focus on AI/LLM integration for data processing pipelines. Proven track record in performance optimization, security, and data visualization. Combines deep backend expertise with modern capabilities to solve complex problems.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

• Backend Development: Java, Python, Spring Boot, Kafka
• Databases: Schema Design, Oracle (PL/SQL, CDC), PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, Redis, ORM
• Performance optimization: JVM tuning, SQL/triggers; performance & scalability improvements
• AI & Analytics: LLM Integration, OCR, Vision Model Inference, Data Visualization
• Cloud & DevOps: AWS (EC2), Docker, Jenkins, CI/CD
• Web & Security: REST API, JavaScript, Microservices, Avro, TLS/mTLS, JWT, PKI, HashiCorp
• Methodologies: Agile, Scrum, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), Test-Driven Development (TDD), Enterprise Architecture, SaaS/SOA, Design Patterns

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Independent Technical Consultant at 5 Local Non-Profits, San Jose, 2023 – Present

• Provided strategic technical leadership across five Northern California non-profit organizations, balancing dual tracks of organizational consulting and hands-on engineering
• Architected digital infrastructure overhaul for one of five, and achieved 156% member growth within a year. Reestablished communication transparency and trained 14 volunteers in technology and operations
• As the Individual Contributor, used Python, AI models for inference, OCR, LLM summarization and tagging, and various web technologies to automate internal tasks and to build and categorize the biggest library in the organization’s domain in Northern California

Principal Software Engineer at Salesforce, San Francisco, 2019 – 2023

• Redesigned a table-slicing algorithm to scale up data processing parallelization. The improvement increased the data processing limit from millions of rows per table to billions of rows. The significant improvement enabled data extraction even before slicing was finished, while minimizing impact on RDBMS performance (Java, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, AWS)
• As part of a focused team, designed a data stream product for seamless data copying to OLAP and data lakes by tapping into RDBMS CDC. Owned the object materialization using the Salesforce Partner API (Java, Oracle CDC, Kafka)
• Led development of security features, including TLS/mTLS support, integration with Hashicorp Vault
• Mentored senior software engineers, interviewed candidates, and oversaw deliveries

Senior Staff Software Engineer at Griddable, San Jose, 2017 – 2019

Early-stage startup specializing in real-time data synchronization and migration infrastructure.

• Developed real-time/offline data cloning between various RDBMS (Java, CDC, Oracle LogMiner, Oracle GoldenGate, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, Git)
• Abstracted the RDBMS layer to separate business logic from database specifics; Isolated differences between various JDBC drivers, reused db connections, fixed all pre-existing DB leaks, and optimized specialized SQL more efficiently. Achieved a 4x reduction in bug frequency, i.e., in UTF support
• Designed and led the development of a database comparator that finds and reports any data discrepancies between heterogeneous data stores. It scaled extremely well to compare databases with terabytes of data. Wrapped in CLI (Java, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL)
• Designed and implemented a JWT-based licensing feature to generate resource or time-limited licenses
• Improved performance of components by 10-240% by reducing db-round-trips & other optimizations

Staff Software Engineer at VMware, Palo Alto, 2007 – 2016

Worked in Cloud Computing, LabManager, AppDirector, and vRealize Automation R&D teams.

• Promoted within the first year from Senior Software Engineer to Staff Software Engineer
• Developed deployment and “day 2” related features of VMware Application Director. Designed AppD public REST API and led implementation (Java, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Hibernate)
• Extended ORM/service layers, virtualization domain logic, and CLI
• Alone converted the vCloud Director database from MS SQL Server to Oracle and PostgreSQL. Converted extremely complex views and stored procedures without any negative performance impact
• Improved database performance (up to 60 times) of the catalog and deployment-related vRA functionality. Analyzed hundreds of SQL statements and arranged a set of indexes to balance SQL performance and index maintenance overhead (PostgreSQL, Java, Hibernate, Redis)
• Designed and developed a company-wide reporting solution to improve the defect management process; Built enterprise reporting pipelines to support DevOps. 80 teams within the company used them daily. Built summary, trend, drill-down reports, and dashboards (SSRS, C#, SQL, MySQL)
• Mentored colleagues in the best database practices, e.g., design, normalization, SQL optimizations
• Advanced dev and QA processes inside the Cloud Computing team by resolving technical challenges, mentoring QA engineers in Java and OOP, and creating frameworks to simplify development. Designed and led the development of API and GUI frameworks (Java, TDD) to fix the automation process

EDUCATION

MS in Computer Science, Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics, Ukraine

• Relevant Coursework: Algorithms, Data Structures, Database Systems, Software Engineering
• Thesis: Multi-Level Conflict Resolution for Integration of Heterogeneous Datastores

PORTFOLIO

Please review my detailed portfolio online: https://rchernikov.com/portfolio

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

• 2022 – Received the Code Excellence Award for providing valuable code reviews
• 2018 – Promoted to Senior Staff Engineer for designing and developing the static data comparator