Alan Gunning

• • Principal engineer and architect designing reusable, cloud-hosted platforms intended to support multiple industries and enterprise-scale use cases

• • Ownership of the full system lifecycle: architecture, backend services, data stores, eventing, observability, cost controls, and operational tooling

• • Designed AI-enabled platforms supporting branching and merge-back conversational workflows, isolating exploratory work from primary system state

• • Implemented graph-backed retrieval (GraphRAG) and sandboxed execution environments for code and data analysis, ensuring results could be merged without polluting core memory

• • Strong emphasis on developer productivity and onboarding, including DevContainers, Codespaces-ready environments, standardised scaffolding, and GitHub-native AI-assisted workflows

• • Combined platform development with senior-level contract and freelance engagements, maintaining hands-on delivery while owning long-term system evolution

• • Senior Java engineer working across multiple critical services on a large-scale education platform supporting millions of users globally

• • Designed and maintained backend services and RESTful APIs using Java, Spring Framework, and Spring Boot, including authentication and identity provider services

• • Developed React-based UI components for authentication, login, and rostering workflows, integrating with backend Spring Boot services

• • Modernised legacy monolithic systems into Spring Boot-based microservices, deployed using containerised environments (Docker, Apache Mesos) with rolling deployments to improve scalability and reliability

• • Developed and maintained Kafka-based messaging systems using Spring Boot (producers and consumers), supporting multiple downstream services such as entitlements and assignments

• • Designed and developed Node.js-based services and APIs supporting identity and rostering data workflows, including development of a custom data store for modelling historical relationships

• • Refactored event-driven pipelines from AWS Lambda/SQS/Kinesis to Apache Kafka, improving scalability, reliability, and system decoupling

• • Took ownership of data correctness, performance, and operational stability, including query optimisation, index design, and zero-downtime database updates

• • Developed high-volume data processing services using Apache Spark to generate reporting and analytics

• • Designed and delivered integration services connecting multiple internal and external enterprise systems using JSON and XML-based APIs

• • Operated systems under high load, including peak traffic scenarios during school onboarding and usage spikes

• • Owned and maintained CI/CD pipelines and development tooling (Jenkins), improving deployment reliability, developer productivity, and release consistency

• • Full-stack engineer on multi-tenant SaaS applications delivering omni-channel retail planning and analytics solutions

• • Developed web applications using Java, Apache Struts 2, JSP/Servlets, and MVC design patterns

• • Developed Angular JS based frontend components integrated with Struts 2 backend services, supporting enterprise user workflows

• • Built and maintained backend services using Java, Hibernate, and relational databases

• • Deployed applications on Apache Tomcat using Maven-based build and dependency management

• • Delivered bespoke enterprise solutions for major North American retailers including Walmart, Target, Gap, and others

• • Worked across backend services, data modelling, and UI layers within distributed, agile teams