WTW

Nov 2016 – Jul 2025

I was hired by Extend Health (later Via Benefits) as a contract developer, was converted to full-time a few months in, and stayed through WTW’s acquisition of the company — 8 years and 6 months in total, ending as a Software Architect.

I joined to help replace the legacy call-floor app — a C# WPF desktop tool agents used to serve customers — with a modern web app. The company’s plans changed, and I spent my early years maintaining the app before we finally got in on the replacement work, helping prep it to host embedded web micro-frontends as a first step. My work involved creating an internal TypeScript library for teams embedding MFEs into the WPF shell, and tracking down a years-old, intermittent crash to a memory leak in a third-party Chromium-embedding package.

In 2020 I moved into the company’s Funding domain to get back to hands-on web development, and was promoted to Software Technical Lead a few months later, steering a small team’s React benefits-election app and its backend eligibility rules. In 2022 I stepped up to Manager after the team’s manager departed, making a great hire, and coordinating a temporary team merger as the product family restructured.

By 2023 I moved into a Software Architect role, a long-standing goal of mine. As architectural liaison between my product family and the central Architecture team, I drove a bounded-context redesign that became the product family’s reference architecture, pushed forward an initiative to replatform a legacy SQL-based calculation engine into an event-driven system — including designing a solution that let an upstream legacy system start publishing domain events without a rewrite. I also continued creation and maintenance of Azure infrastructure and deployment pipelines for newly-split bounded contexts, and bootstrapped a nifty shared service-catalog schema for our Backstage.io-based app that was adopted org-wide.