TJL · 

Thomas Jae Lew

Ten years in the making.

Software EngineerFull StackDevOpsFinTech

▶  Begin the Feature

Prologue · The Origin

Every system has
an origin story.

The story opens at UC Irvine, in biological sciences — the study of living systems. One recalibration later, it becomes the study of engineered ones: an Associate degree in Computer Information Science for Computer Programming at Solano Community College.

Before the first commit, there was a decade on the floor — restaurants, retail, a theme park, a dispensary. Six roles that taught what no bootcamp can: show up, communicate clearly, stay calm when the queue is long and the stakes are live.

Then FinTech called. What follows is ten-plus years of work, distilled into three chapters — full-stack development inside major banks, DevOps architecture at enterprise scale, and precision hardware bound for the laboratories of the life sciences.

Cold open · The first decade

HostIHOP2014–15
Sales AssociateVallejo Holistic Health2015–16
Sales AssociateJ. Crew Factory2016–18
ServerKoong Jyun Korean BBQ2017–18
Ride OperatorSix Flags Discovery Kingdom2018
Sales AssociateKolas2019–20
10+
Years in the workforce
2+
Years FinTech full stack
3
Engineering disciplines
110
WPM peak input rate

Education · 2014–2020

Solano Community College

A.S. Computer Information Science — Computer Programming · Fairfield, CA

Education · 2013–2014

University of California, Irvine

Biological Sciences · Irvine, CA

Director's Statement

Why does a résumé look like a film? Because this is how I build software.

Every frame of this site — the shader-driven light, the generative score, the scroll choreography — lives in a single HTML file. No frameworks, no templates, no page builder. And full disclosure: I didn't hand-write it. I designed it, directed it, and shipped it in collaboration with AI — hundreds of decisions and revision cycles, every detail argued over until it earned its place. That's the same discipline I bring to production systems: clear intent, relentless iteration, and ownership of the result.

The engineer behind it: a San Francisco Bay Area builder who started in biological sciences at UC Irvine, retrained in computer science while working service-floor jobs, and came out the other side shipping lending features for national banks and deployment platforms for two hundred teams. I like making complex systems feel inevitable — and I'd rather show you than tell you.

One file · Zero frameworks · AI-assisted, human-directed

Engineers: right-click → View Source. It’s all there.

Now Showing

The Work.

Three chapters. One trajectory.

Ch. I RevatureCh. II HexawareCh. III Arista

Chapter I · Feb 2021 — Jul 2023

Full Stack,
High Stakes

Revature — Reston, VASoftware DeveloperEmbedded engineering inside America's major banks.

Scene 01 · Initiation

Forged in full stack.
Deployed where money moves.

Intensive training in full-stack web development — Java and Spring on the back end, React on the front — followed by immediate deployment into consumer banking, where every deploy touches real accounts. Told to learn Ruby on Rails before day one, I arrived to find the banks didn't run Rails at all — their stack was plain Ruby and React. So I adapted again and shipped in the stack that was actually there. Every change authored alongside test-driven development, then carried through Jenkins into UAT and production environments.

Role Configuration
Payments Processing Team

Developer on the payment processing team for national banking clients — the layer of software where every edge case has a dollar sign attached, and correctness is the entire job.

Scene 02 · The Flagship Feature · My Build

I designed & shipped the lending feature banks now headline —

Buy Now,
Pay Later.

Engineered for major banking partners.
Real customers. Real money. Zero margin for error.

Designed and developed a Buy Now, Pay Later capability for multiple major banking partners — a customer-facing lending feature at national scale, built inside the payments stack where installment logic, policy rules, and payment processing all have to agree, every single time.

Scene 03 · Live Fire

Rewriting the rules
of live lending.

Updated and created financial loan policies running in production across multiple banking partners — changing the rules of active lending systems while they served customers, without breaking stride. Policy logic is where regulation meets code; this was hands on the controls.

Production Discipline
Test-Driven. Pipeline-Delivered.

Code changes authored alongside test-driven development and released through Jenkins deployment pipelines into UAT and production — the same rigor for a policy tweak as for a flagship feature.

Scene 04 · The Launch

365

Days from kickoff to live

Zero to launch
in one year.

Took a banking client's debut loan application from first line of code to a live production launch within the span of a single year — a brand-new lending product, stood up and shipped to the public. Not a prototype. Not a pilot. Live.

In Association With

Delivered as a consulting engineer across America's leading financial institutions.

Capital One
Consumer Banking & Lending
TD
Retail Banking
PNC
Financial Services
Barclays
Global Banking
& Others
Leading Financial Partners

On-Set Technologies

RubyReact TypeScriptJavaScript JavaSpring Framework HTML5CSS3 REST APIsSQL JenkinsGit macOS JUnitTest-Driven Development Payment ProcessingLoan Origination Agile / ScrumUAT / Production Releases

Chapter II · Sep 2023 — May 2025

The Architecture of Scale

Hexaware Technologies — Iselin, NJTechnical ArchitectEnterprise DevOps in support of Fannie Mae.

Scene 01 · The Promotion

From building the product
to building the factory.

The role changes: no longer writing one application, but architecting the machinery that ships all of them. As Technical Architect, the mandate was enterprise automation — designing, standardizing, and maintaining the deployment backbone an entire organization releases software through.

Scene 02 · The Scale

~200

Application teams · One deployment backbone

Created and maintained automation deployment pipelines serving approximately two hundred internal application teams. Every build, every release, every environment — moving through pipeline architecture designed at this desk. When the backbone is yours, "it works on my machine" is replaced by "it works, everywhere, on schedule."

Scene 03 · Principal Engagement

Fannie Mae

Enterprise DevOps engineering in support of a cornerstone of American housing finance — where uptime, auditability, and precision are non-negotiable.

Scene 04 · The Systems

SYS·01 — Pipelines
The CI/CD Estate

Built and deployed Jenkins CI/CD pipelines across dev, test, and production environments; managed applications, databases, and configurations in IBM UrbanCode Deploy, with repositories in Bitbucket.

SYS·02 — IaC
Infrastructure as Code

Established UrbanCode Deploy components and Jenkins jobs as Infrastructure as Code, and configured environment component properties for pipelines — including CloudFormation and S3.

SYS·03 — Cloud
AWS Provisioning

Provisioned AWS resources for enterprise workloads across container services, RDS, and Redshift — the compute, data, and warehouse layers behind ~200 teams' applications.

SYS·04 — Modernization
The Next Generation

Began the enterprise transition of application DevOps workflows to GitLab and Terraform — modernizing the toolchain mid-flight, without stopping the release train.

On-Set Technologies

JenkinsIBM UrbanCode Deploy AWSCloudFormation S3RDS RedshiftContainer Services TerraformGitLab CI/CD BitbucketInfrastructure as Code GroovyBash / Shell YAMLJira Service Management LinuxRelease Management

Chapter III · Jul 2025 — Feb 2026

Precision, Proven

Arista Corporation — Fremont, CATesting TechnicianIndustrial systems for the life sciences.

Scene 01 · The Stakes

Built for the lab.
Proven before it ships.

Quality-controlled and packaged industrial-grade PCs bound for pharmaceutical, biotech, and life-science facilities — machines that run instruments and labs, not spreadsheets. In this world a failed unit isn't an inconvenience; it's a stopped experiment. Every system was interrogated before it earned the right to ship.

Documentation
Writing the Playbook

Authored SOPs and technical manuals codifying workflow processes — turning tribal knowledge into institutional documentation that outlasts any single shift.

Scene 02 · The Gauntlet — Every Unit, Every Test

Test·01
Burn-In

Sustained stress validation under load — proving stability long before a lab ever powers it on.

Test·02
Memory

Full memory integrity verification — because corrupted data in a life-science context is not an option.

Test·03
I/O Ports

Every interface validated — the connection points between the machine and the instruments it will drive.

Test·04
Calibration

Precision alignment and calibration testing — accuracy verified, documented, and signed off.

On-Set Technologies

Hardware QABurn-In Testing Memory DiagnosticsI/O Validation Calibration TestingSOP Authoring Technical DocumentationWindows LinuxThinManager Q8 Edge OS Quality ControlRegulated Industry Standards

The Arsenal

Tools of the trade.

Every technology, one standard: production-grade.

Languages & Frameworks
JavaSpring FrameworkSpring Boot RubyJavaScript (ES6+)TypeScript SQLGroovyBashYAML
Frontend Engineering
ReactHTML5CSS3 Responsive Design REST API IntegrationJSON
DevOps & CI/CD
JenkinsIBM UrbanCode DeployGitLab CI/CD Pipeline ArchitectureInfrastructure as Code Test-Driven DevelopmentJUnitRelease Management
Cloud & Infrastructure
AWSCloudFormationTerraform S3RDSRedshift Container ServicesLinuxWindowsmacOS
Version Control & Delivery
GitGitHubBitbucket Jira Service ManagementAgile / Scrum Object-Oriented Programming
Domain Expertise
Payment ProcessingBuy Now, Pay Later Loan OriginationLending Policy Systems Enterprise AutomationHardware QA

Operator spec — input rate 90–110 WPM · clear communicator · relentless learner · team player · detail-obsessed

The Final Act

The sequel is
in pre-production.

Now casting: the next production — full stack, DevOps, or the role that demands both.

✉  tjae.lew@gmail.com ☏  (707) 724-2060 LinkedIn ↗

On location — San Francisco Bay Area, California

Directed by

Thomas Jae Lew

Engineered by

Thomas Jae Lew × Claude

Shot on location in

Dev · Test · Production

fin.

© 2026 Thomas Jae Lew — All systems operational