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, through 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, working restaurants, retail, and a theme park. Those roles taught what no bootcamp can. You show up, you communicate clearly, and you 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. They cover 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 lives in a single HTML file, from the shader-driven light to the generative score to the scroll choreography. There are no frameworks, no templates, and no page builder. And full disclosure, I didn't hand-write it. I designed it, directed it, and shipped it in collaboration with AI, through 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, built on clear intent, relentless iteration, and ownership of the result.

The engineer behind it is 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

I sat on the payment processing team for national banking clients, building 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, with 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. That's 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 JenkinsDockerPostmanGit 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 proves stability long before a lab ever powers it on.

Test·02
Memory

Every unit gets full memory integrity verification, because corrupted data in a life-science context is not an option.

Test·03
I/O Ports

Every interface is validated, down to the connection points between the machine and the instruments it will drive.

Test·04
Calibration

Precision alignment and calibration testing closes the run, with 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.

The next production is now casting, whether 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

Post-Credits Scene

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