AJ Danelz

Tech Lead | Cloud-Native Architect | Full-Stack Dev | OSS Advocate 🥑

Resume PDF | Linktr.ee

Summary

Engineering leader and architect with deep cloud-native, distributed systems expertise. I currently serve as technical manager, chief architect, and principal engineer for an integration platform, owning both the architecture and the team that builds it. My background spans event-driven microservices, developer tooling, and open-source advocacy, with a proven ability to collaborate globally across technical and non-technical teams. I focus on developer experience and on building systems a team can reason about.

Core Competencies

• Technical Leadership: People Management, Hiring & Performance, Architecture Governance, Mentoring, Vision & Goal Planning, Metric & KPI Reporting
• Languages & Frameworks: Java, Spring Boot, Apache Camel, Golang, TypeScript, Vue.js, React, Node.js
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, AWS, Google Cloud, Keycloak
• APIs & Messaging: gRPC, Protobuf, OpenAPI, Kafka, RabbitMQ
• Data: PostgreSQL, Hibernate, Redis, ElasticSearch, MongoDB
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Micrometer
• DevOps & CI/CD: Git, GitLab CI, Gradle, Renovate, Terraform
• Developer Advocacy & Community: Technical Content Creation, Open-Source Maintenance, Public Speaking, Event Management

Professional Experience

Tech Lead, X1 Integration Platform

Rygen Technologies | Dec 2024 - Present

I am the technical manager of Rygen X1 iPaaS , serving as chief architect, principal engineer, and people manager for the 10-person product team. I set the architectural direction of the platform and approve every change that goes into it.

• Engineering leadership: Own hiring, growth, and performance for the team. Reviewed thousands of merge requests across dozens of repositories, and defined the review process itself: CODEOWNERS ownership, automated reviewer routing, and default approver rules.
• 3.0 Control Plane / Data Plane architecture: Designed and built both sides of the contract between the two systems. Protobuf ownership with commit-SHA pinning and an ancestry gate so a change traces to the exact commit that produced it, a tuned gRPC transport with a documented envelope error model, a shape-versioned secret envelope, and per-workspace Data Plane deployment. Removed the legacy tenant axis and made workspace the sole scoping unit across domain, API, UI, and transport.
• Runtime reliability: Stopped Kubernetes rollouts from losing in-flight work, using graceful shutdown, exchange tracking, and abandoned-exchange marking. Replaced ad-hoc pools with shared Micrometer-instrumented Camel thread pools, made the Tomcat connector fail fast when saturated, and moved dispatch to leaderless gRPC with pod-local route self-healing.
• Observability: Introduced OpenTelemetry to X1 and extended it into a platform-wide telemetry contract: Camel route instrumentation, metrics, trace-stamped user-facing errors, Faro frontend telemetry, Grafana dashboards, and migration of flow-run history off MongoDB onto timeseries SQL storage.
• API and frontend platform: Standardized the API on OpenAPI with discriminator mappings and static spec generation, so the Vue UI is generated from the contract instead of hand-maintained against it. Led a frontend type-safety epic (typed routing, generated enums, a ZodForm JSON-Forms framework driven by backend annotations) and an audited design-token system with lint enforcement and dark theme.
• Build platform and DX: Owned the build and CI story across the org: Java 25, Spring Boot 4.x on Camel 4.x LTS, Gradle version catalogs, Renovate policy and fleet sharding, change-scoped CI jobs, module-separated caches, and a Docker image proxy for CI and testcontainers.
• Stack: Java, Spring Boot, Apache Camel, gRPC/Protobuf, PostgreSQL, Hibernate, Vue/TypeScript, Keycloak, Kubernetes, Helm, GitLab CI, OpenTelemetry, Grafana.

Head of Developer Experience

Aklivity | Mar 2023 - Nov 2024

Aklivity is an early-stage startup that enables event-driven solutions by proxying multiple API protocols onto Apache Kafka. I created and executed the vision for all aspects of community engagement and product documentation.

• Rebuilt the developer onboarding experience for the Zilla project , including documentation, examples repositories, and interactive demos.
• Owned community engagement through regular updates, feature announcements, and demo walkthroughs.
• Ran first-response troubleshooting for the community and fed that feedback back into product quality.
• Represented the company at developer conferences and hackathons, creating product demos and handling booth responsibilities.

Head of Developer Relations

WSO2 | Jan 2022 - Mar 2023

• Led the Developer Relations team, building the community around WSO2’s open-source and SaaS offerings, including the Ballerina programming language.
• Created the Ballerina Exercism.io track , improving language education and adoption.
• Coordinated global events, including hackathons and conferences.
• Spoke on technical topics at industry events.
• Partnered with product teams and technical writers to improve documentation and user experience across WSO2 products.

Lead Solutions Engineer

WSO2 | Feb 2021 - Jan 2022

• Drove adoption of WSO2 products alongside the sales team, providing technical consultations and solution design.
• Secured the first customer for the Asgardeo SaaS platform .
• Authored an opinion article on identity management and tech debt .

Senior Full Stack Developer

BMW - Apps and Services | Feb 2020 - Feb 2021

• Built services for BMW Charge Forward , a platform optimizing electric vehicle charging through real-time energy data.
• Delivered the backend on Node.js and NestJS, integrating AWS Lambda, SQS, and Kinesis to handle streams of vehicle data.

Senior Enterprise Application Engineer

AFS Logistics | Jan 2018 - Feb 2020

• Transportation Management System: Led development of a high-performance microservices system built with Spring Boot, Golang, Kafka, Redis, and PostgreSQL, deployed on Kubernetes and Helm. Key components included a Rating System, a Document Manager, and a Delayed Message Delivery service.
• Delayed Message Delivery Service: Designed and implemented a service that scaled efficiently using Kafka and Redis.

Full Stack Mentor

Thinkful Inc | Jan 2018 - Dec 2020

• Mentored students in React.js and web design patterns, helping them overcome development hurdles and deepening their understanding of full-stack web development.

Enterprise Application Engineer

Transplace (now Uber Freight ) | Oct 2012 - Dec 2017

• Maintained legacy applications, improved and extended existing products like Real-time Search, and architected new applications like the Dynamic EDI Parser.
• Real-time Search: Added an ElasticSearch API on top of a monolithic Groovy on Grails, PostgreSQL, and Hibernate ORM application, reducing processing load and improving user-built query latency.
• Dynamic EDI Parser: Developed an algorithm to parse EDI files dynamically into object formats (XML, JSON) for easier integration and extensibility.

Open Source

OSS Maintainer

Independent | Jan 2019 - Present

• Gohlay : Creator of an open-source CLI tool written in Golang that interacts with Kafka to deliver scheduled messages. The tool is lightweight, scalable, and operates without external data dependencies.
• vue-pdf : Maintainer of a Vue.js library for rendering individual PDF pages as markup elements.
• awesome-data-engineering : Maintain the list, ensuring it remains up-to-date with the latest tools and technologies.

Education

B.S. in Computer Science (Cum Laude) Southern Wesleyan University

Additional Information

• Public Content: Highlights and links to my Blog, video, and documentation work
• Awards: Eagle Scout with Silver Palm
• Research: Path Planning using Dijkstra and Lightning Enhancement