Derek Robati

Team Lead

• Managing 6 engineers across two teams with 3 direct reports, conducting regular one-on-ones and mentoring developers on technical growth and career development.
• Running daily "ticket talk" sessions where engineers surface blocking issues and get hands-on help to move past them, keeping sprint velocity high.
• Leading cross-functional PCI DSS compliance initiatives, coordinating security assessments, remediation, and audit preparation across engineering.
• Driving SOX compliance by implementing internal controls over financial reporting systems, ensuring data integrity and auditability across payment workflows.
• Architected and shipped an ACH reject handling system, reducing manual intervention and improving reconciliation accuracy for failed transactions.
• Championing AI adoption across the engineering organization, introducing tooling and workflows that accelerate development velocity.
• Built MCP servers that give AI assistants context into the platform's orchestration layer and automate test merchant onboarding, reducing setup friction for developers.
• Evaluating and integrating observability and session analytics platforms to improve production visibility and user experience insights.
• Serving as the escalation point for Level 1 production incidents after years of on-call rotations, triaging and resolving critical issues across the platform.

Senior Software Engineer

6 years 7 months

• Core contributor to a merchant management platform handling onboarding, risk assessment, underwriting, KYC, and transaction reporting across major payment processor integrations.
• Built and maintained integrations with external payment processors and internal products including banking and payroll services — delivered a payroll integration in 2 weeks vs. the typical 8-week timeline.
• Developed merchant-facing application UI and agent-facing tools for onboarding, case management, and ongoing merchant lifecycle operations.
• Worked across a 60+ microservice architecture on Kubernetes, leveraging Kafka for event streaming, Redis for caching, MySQL for persistence, and Elasticsearch for search and reporting.
• Built administration features including role-based access control, multitenancy, domain/permission management, and configurable branding and email templates.
• Shipped KYC and auto-underwriting features integrating third-party APIs, compressing merchant onboarding from 3 weeks to under a day.
• Conducted feasibility analysis on sunsetting 2 legacy applications, mapping dependencies and outlining migration paths for stakeholders.
• Led architecture improvements including migrating legacy routing to React Router, replacing Redux with React Query, and maintaining 100% unit test coverage across contributions.
• Created a CLI tool that simplified the team's branching strategy, adopted by developers to streamline day-to-day git workflows.
• Built a debugging UI for navigating complex audit logs, giving engineers fast visibility into transaction and system event history.
• Rotated on-call in two-week shifts for multiple years, diagnosing and resolving production issues across the stack at any hour.
• Built internal developer tooling that automated repetitive tasks, reducing manual effort and common errors.

Director of Apps and Services

10 months

• Introduced React and Go as the team's core stack, establishing the architecture the team shipped and maintained.
• Built a React and Redux dashboard for real-time health monitoring of network elements.
• Owned the existing API and web interface, shipping features and resolving production issues.
• Created onboarding documentation and internal wiki resources adopted across engineering and operations.
• Managed a team of five across four OS platforms, a web application, and multiple microservices.

Senior Software Engineer

1 year 11 months

• Prototyped an engineering dashboard that validated the target tech stack and informed the team's architecture direction.
• Shipped features and fixes for the web admin panel and REST API.
• Contributed to UI/UX design reviews and architecture decisions shaping the product roadmap.
• Wrote comprehensive unit tests for the REST interface, establishing the team's testing standards.
• Overhauled API documentation with versioning, request/response examples, and consistent formatting.
• Stood up GitLab CE from scratch, defined the git workflow, and implemented continuous delivery across the team.
• Built a prototype Kafka event pipeline with Go microservices, deployable across multiple Docker containers.
• Administered the Jenkins CI server and maintained build nodes for each supported OS.

Software Production Engineer

1 year

• Collaborated remotely with an international engineering team across multiple time zones.
• Built Python API wrappers for Collabnet, Artifactory, Jenkins, and Git, simplifying cross-tool automation.
• Created a changelog generator that linked commits to user stories, giving stakeholders clear release visibility.
• Built an internal release notes system that auto-generated reports of build metadata and code changes.
• Provisioned simulation build infrastructure used by the team to validate builds before production.
• Developed an Artifactory CLI tool for querying, filtering, and fetching build artifacts.

Systems Integration Testing Engineer

4 years

• Standardized test environments using Vagrant, ensuring consistent Unix setups across the team.
• Proposed and implemented the team's first continuous integration workflow.
• Built test automation suites and a reusable Python testing framework adopted across multiple products.
• Developed Test Set libraries that mapped requirements to executable test coverage.
• Derived test plans from product requirements across multiple product lines.
• Delivered live product demos to existing and prospective clients.

Operations & Production Test Engineer

4 years

• Built TestStand suites that validated manufacturing limits on newly produced modules.
• Created an internal Django web app that gave other departments visibility into Test Engineering projects.

Internship

1 year

• Gained hands-on experience with fiber optic telecommunications technology and industry protocols.
• Performed precision calibration of test and measurement equipment.
• Extended an internal wxPython desktop application with new features for the engineering team.