Corey McCarty

Staff / Principal Software Engineer Technical Direction | Distributed Data Infrastructure | Legacy Modernization

Twelve years setting technical direction from inside the code, usually as the person a platform can't run without. I carry a working model of the whole system, which is how I spot where a change will break something three steps away, and I write that knowledge down so it stops depending on me. My depth is in distributed data infrastructure, AWS, and legacy modernization. I own critical production systems and grow the engineers around me.

Experience

Lead Developer - Summit Professional Education

Dec 2021 - Present

Senior-most engineer and technical owner for a platform serving 528K accounts, 3.5M+ enrollments, and ~20K monthly active professionals across all 50 states. Full-time through Aug 2026, retained since as an independent architecture advisor on in-flight platform and billing migrations. (Staff Engineer / Engineering Lead scope)

Set direction to retire a legacy Universe/Pick data-entry system by building its replacement Vue 3-native on the next-generation ops platform, turning a framework migration the board wouldn't fund into a side effect of new feature work.
Cut a customer-facing B2B account page from ~10 minutes to under a minute with a relation-table redesign; the sales team had refused to demo it and now uses it live to close contracts.
Owned the subscription engine at the center of the platform: Recurly subscriptions mirrored through webhooks into a near-real-time access-grant cache in Aurora, processing roughly 60K paid subscription invoices a year.
Eliminated 12+ monthly dev tickets by making B2B client signup pages, negotiated-discount groupings, and account rosters sales-configurable.
Operated as the team's safety net instead of its bottleneck: I handed off clean problem definitions so three of five engineers ran their own domains, the website, the Yeti platform, and the deployment pipelines, end to end, while I owned every code review and pull request.
Served as the sole technical partner to a non-technical CTO brought in during a 2024 leadership change, his only direct report, translating system realities into decisions he could act on.
Championed AI-assisted development from zero, bringing JetBrains AI Assistant to every engineer, then decomposed a CTO's single-file prototype into an on-demand skill system with per-developer profiles, a PR-review workflow, and a repository wiring map, so cross-system knowledge lives in the repo.
Coached engineers through migrations they wouldn't attempt alone, including a nine-month Vue 2 to Vue 3 migration where I asked questions and let the engineer make the architectural calls.
Mentored a bootcamp-trained frontend developer who grew into a full-stack contributor and now owns the deployment pipeline for the main website and its API, releasing directly to both test and production.
Recovered a week of failed payments caused by a finance-side processor change, scripting bulk retries against Recurly's API and pivoting from Python to Node around a blocking bug in the official client library.
Implemented new AWS Personalize, AWS CloudSearch, and Pipedrive integrations, and maintained and evolved the platform's broader integration surface spanning Recurly, Iterable, ON24, HubSpot, and Podbean.
Recovered organic search from ~30th to a consistent top 10 after an SSR regression, directing a specialist's fixes across ~300 server errors and 600+ Core Web Vitals issues.
Shipped a board-mandated CMS migration abandoned mid-flight, landing static HubSpot pages alongside the Nuxt app with no visible seam to users.
Maintained 140+ Lambda functions across the auth path and core business workflows at near-100% measured availability, and led the AL2 to AL2023 migration with a clean-environment strategy.
Aligned product, marketing, sales, and customer service behind a single engineering priority queue, turning four departments' competing demands into clean execution on every new product and feature.

Software Engineer - Juice Plus

Jun 2020 - Dec 2021

Took sole ownership of an undocumented, business-critical Java ETL and reverse-engineered it from the code to become the team's subject-matter expert.
Prototyped a bridging API unifying five disparate databases behind a single business-entity interface (Hapi, TypeScript, Prisma), learning the full stack from scratch to build it.
Evaluated Go for the next-generation platform and recommended against adoption despite its technical fit, citing the org-wide rollover cost for an all-Java team.
Worked alongside the company's most tenured engineers on next-generation architecture and OpenAPI design after an incoming director routed proof-of-concept work my way.

Software Engineer - Atos / Syntel (client: FedEx)

Sep 2014 - May 2020

Owned and operated a Tier 1 XML document platform (~60TB) across two data centers, holding flight records and the auth data other systems depended on; carried 24/7/365 on-call alone for four years.
Resolved most off-hours incidents by tracing faults to their real source, often proving the problem lived in a client system rather than ours.
Built the runtime-configurable data layer behind an internal InfoSec risk-scoring system, a field model returning confidence scores on signals like IP, location, and domain.

Code Connector - Volunteer

Apr 2019 - Present

Co-designed and run The Coding Dojo, a guided mob-programming meetup for newer developers; maintain the shared solutions repo and led a Hacktoberfest push. Several participants credit the Dojo with the confidence that landed their first developer jobs.
Mentor developers at all levels on coding, career strategy, and advancement.

Skills

Languages

Java, Spring Boot, JavaScript (Vue, Nuxt, Node), TypeScript, Python, SQL, Bash, Groovy

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS (Lambda, SQS, Aurora/RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, API Gateway, EC2, CloudWatch), Docker, Jenkins

Databases

Aurora MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, Rocket UniVerse (Pick)

Practices

Event-driven architecture (SQS/Lambda, JMS), REST, CI/CD, code-review ownership, AI-assisted development (Claude, JetBrains AI Assistant)

Education

University of Memphis

B.S. in Computer Engineering - 2013

Hands-on study of software and hardware system design, from circuits and assembly up through the presentation layer, with math coursework in probability, statistics, calculus, and differential equations.