Elijah Crain

Software Engineer

About Me

I am a software engineer with a passion for film photography, robotics, 3D design and 3D printing, CNC manufacturing, game theory, programming, and learning new things!.

Contact Information

  • Location: Columbus, OH

Skills & Expertise

Languages

Java, C++, Python, TypeScript, Bash

Frameworks and Libraries

Spring, Spring Boot, React, Next.js, Svelte, Qt6, Flyway, Lombok, JUnit

Cloud & DevOps

AWS, EKS, GCP, GKE, Azure DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, Conlfluent Cloud, Git, GitHub, GitHub Actions

Databases

DynamoDB, MongoDB, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL

Tools

CMake, Maven, Gradle, Postman, Linux, IntelliJ, Eclipse, Dynamics 365, Jira, Confluence

Professional Experience

Software Engineer at Prime Therapeutics

November 2024–Current
  • Optimized and extended GitHub Actions and GitHub Workflows across the organization to enhance continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and security scanning processes.
  • Implemented functionality to support provenance and attestation recording for containers built using CI workflows for auditing and software supply chain security.
  • Designed and implemented reusable pipelines to push and pull Docker images to and from AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR), integrating Grype vulnerability scanning for Optura AI workloads.
  • Architected and deployed EC2 infrastructure using launch templates and AWS CodePipeline, enabling automated and repeatable deployment workflows for application environments.
  • Developed an automated GitHub user management system leveraging the GitHub GraphQL API to identify inactive users and generate ServiceNow removal requests, reducing license costs to only active contributors.
  • Configured Dynatrace monitoring and alerting for production servers and CI/CD runners, establishing automated on-call notification workflows to minimize mean time to detection for infrastructure incidents.
  • Engineered and deployed a React application to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), integrating with Confluent Cloud to centralize and visualize Kafka cluster and topic information.
  • Maintained and upgraded internal infrastructure including Confluence and Jira instances, diagnosed server performance bottlenecks using system monitoring tools.

Software Engineer at Aflac

September 2022–November 2024
  • Modernized legacy enrollment data distribution system for four customer management systems by establishing a micro-service architecture. Improved response time by 65\%, enhancing integration and distribution of data in real-time.
  • Streamed data using Kafka (MSK) cluster and managed consumer groups for horizontal scaling. Achieved a 100\% message delivery success rate withstanding peak loads of over 250,000 requests per day.
  • Developed servers with Spring Boot and Maven that provided REST APIs, Kafka publishers and consumers as well as direct database updates.
  • Secured services with OAuth 2.0 tokens, implemented automated API call retries, and protected downstream endpoints with circuit breaking.
  • Configured AWS lambdas with MSK event sources to transform data through DynamoDB tables. Utilized DynamoDB streams to trigger lambdas to post updates back to Kafka.
  • Improved CI/CD to create docker containers for upload to AWS ECR and deployment using cloud formation. Created a comprehensive suite for unit and integration testing, providing 90\% code coverage. Logged progress using Splunk and saved failed messages to S3.

Engineering Intern at Southern Environmental Inc.

May 2019–August 2019
  • Increased particle uptake in wet electrostatic precipitators by 30\% using computational fluid dynamics simulations to develop an optimal hole pattern for irrigation with varying pressures.
  • Analyzed flow distribution and particle uptake data in MATLAB to identify and address performance bottlenecks and presented recommendations to the design team.

Student Assistant at UF Center for Undergraduate Research

August 2019–May 2021
  • Automated data analysis using Python to load data from Qualtrics survey platform and perform statistical analysis with Pandas to compare the success of different programs. Generated interactive reports using generated data and Jupyter Notebook.
  • Built an iOS app that mapped research posters at the UF Undergraduate Research Symposium, an event that hosted over 200 presenters and 500 attendees yearly. Significantly reduced paper use.

Achievements

B.S. in Mechanical Engineering

University of Florida

Capstone Project: Design and product of a modular mostly 3D printed heliostat running on ESP32. Designed closed-loop control system to manage over 1000+ heliostats using one server.