Senior / staff engineering roles — remote-first, with a focus on agentic AI and backend platforms.

Raya Meresa

Senior Software Engineer · Agentic AI & Full-Stack

13+ years building enterprise and financial systems end to end — Java/Spring microservices and secure APIs on the backend, React/TypeScript on the front. I build agentic AI systems hands-on: multi-agent orchestration, tool-calling against real APIs, and human-in-the-loop approval workflows.

Washington, DC – Maryland – Virginia metro · Remote-first

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13+
Years engineering
7
Enterprise & fintech teams
Daily
Agentic-AI builder
01

Experience

Senior Software Engineer — UnitedHealth Group / Optum
Feb 2025 – Present · Remote
Healthcare
  • Build and support healthcare Prior-Authorization systems — Java/Spring Boot microservices and REST APIs for member/provider validation, case creation, and status processing.
  • Deliver enterprise healthcare messaging and integrations with Kafka/JMS, Spring Integration, and ActiveMQ, with resiliency patterns — retries, connection pooling, timeouts, structured error handling.
  • Modernize applications by migrating from MySQL to MongoDB and running services on AWS/EKS, Kubernetes, Docker, and S3.
  • Built a centralized log-archival microservice for 16+ applications that automatically archives logs from Kubernetes/EKS to S3 with duplicate prevention, monitoring, and alerts.
  • Tune high-volume API performance and resolve production incidents across integrated systems, handling PHI-sensitive data responsibly.
  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Kafka
  • JMS
  • MongoDB
  • AWS EKS
  • Kubernetes
  • Splunk
  • Grafana
Senior Software Engineer — Amazon
May 2023 – Jan 2025 · Arlington, VA
E-commerce / Cloud
  • Designed and built cloud-native microservices in Java 11/17/21 with Spring Boot.
  • Built a multi-channel communication platform with AWS Pinpoint (SMS, email, push) backed by DynamoDB for high-volume delivery and tracking.
  • Developed serverless microservices on AWS Lambda (IAM/VPC-secured), exposed via API Gateway; automated CI/CD with CodePipeline/CodeDeploy.
  • Built Incident-AI — an AI-driven incident-management automation integrating ServiceNow, Splunk, and GitHub to correlate incidents with logs/code and produce root-cause reports (human-in-the-loop).
  • Used Amazon Q for AI-assisted development with review before merge.
  • Java 17/21
  • Spring Boot
  • AWS Lambda
  • DynamoDB
  • API Gateway
  • Amazon Q
  • React
  • Angular
Senior Software Engineer — FedEx
Feb 2021 – Apr 2023 · Irving, TX
Logistics
  • Led a dev team building and deploying microservices for the packages-and-deliveries domain.
  • Secured microservice APIs with Spring Security; owned CI/CD with Jenkins + Bitbucket deploying to PCF.
  • Built Splunk and AppDynamics dashboards for cross-application log analysis and performance.
  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Spring Security
  • Jenkins
  • PCF
  • Splunk
  • AppDynamics
Senior Software Engineer — Citi Bank
Apr 2020 – Jan 2021 · Irving, TX
Financial Services
  • Designed event-driven microservices with Kafka and Kafka Streams for real-time digital-banking processing.
  • Delivered REST APIs across the full SDLC with Spring Security; SonarQube quality gates reduced technical debt.
  • Kafka
  • Kafka Streams
  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Spring Security
  • PCF
Senior Software Engineer — General Motors
Aug 2019 – Mar 2020 · Irving, TX
Automotive
  • Migrated legacy code to microservices and improved performance by reducing API response payloads.
  • Built REST service templates with Swagger + Yeoman; production monitoring via Splunk/Kibana.
  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Kafka
  • Swagger
  • Splunk
  • Kibana
Java / Microservices Developer — Citi Bank
Apr 2018 – Jul 2019 · Irving, TX
Financial Services
  • Drove digital transformation of mobile-management services to microservices with Spring Boot/Cloud and Netflix OSS (Eureka, Zuul, Hystrix) on PCF.
  • Introduced Kafka + Kafka Streams for event-driven communication.
  • Java
  • Spring Cloud
  • Netflix OSS
  • Kafka
  • PCF
Technology Analyst — BNSF Railways
Sep 2017 – Apr 2018 · Fort Worth, TX
Rail / Logistics
  • Migrated mainframe legacy systems to RESTful/SOAP services with Java, Spring Boot, JMS, and ActiveMQ.
  • Built pub/sub messaging with Apache SEDA and JMS listeners consuming from remote ActiveMQ.
  • Core Java
  • Spring Boot
  • JMS
  • ActiveMQ
  • Jenkins
02

Skills

Agentic AI & LLM

  • Multi-agent orchestration (LangGraph / CrewAI-style)
  • LLM tool-calling over internal APIs & microservices
  • Human-in-the-loop approval gates
  • Agent state & memory, RAG + vector search (pgvector)
  • Multi-provider routing/failover (OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter)
  • Agent observability, tracing & output evaluation
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP), prompt engineering

AI-Assisted Development

  • Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Amazon Q
  • AI-assisted delivery with review & validation
  • Regression & policy guardrails for AI changes

Backend

  • Java (8 / 11 / 17 / 21)
  • Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Security, Spring Data JPA
  • Secure REST APIs, microservices
  • Kafka & Kafka Streams, JMS, event-driven architecture
  • Python — FastAPI / Flask, Node.js

Frontend

  • React, Next.js, TypeScript
  • Angular, responsive UI
  • HTML5, CSS3 / Tailwind

Cloud & DevOps

  • AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, EC2, SQS/SNS, IAM, VPC, CloudFormation, X-Ray)
  • Docker, Kubernetes / EKS, PCF
  • CI/CD — Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, Bitbucket
  • Railway, Vercel

Data & Observability

  • PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, DB2, MongoDB, DynamoDB
  • Query tuning & indexing for high-volume workloads
  • JUnit, Mockito, Cucumber, SonarQube
  • Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace, AppDynamics
03

Things I've built

AethOS

A multi-tenant agentic-AI operating platform — multi-agent orchestration, LLM tool-calling against real provider APIs, human-in-the-loop approvals, per-tenant vault, and RBAC.

  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • LLM orchestration
  • Postgres
  • Railway

PursuitCue

A live SaaS that scores US federal janitorial opportunities for small contractors — real Node backend, wired Postgres, field-level encryption, hash-chained audit log, TOTP MFA, and a bid-pricing workspace.

  • Node.js
  • PostgreSQL
  • Security hardening
  • Railway
Visit PursuitCue →

TrueConform

A web-accessibility compliance product — deterministic axe-core scanning with plain-language findings, a grade, and a fix toolkit. (This very site is built to the standards it checks.)

  • Node.js
  • Playwright
  • axe-core
  • WCAG

ShadowGate

A pre-execution safety gate for autonomous agents — intercepts a proposed agent action before it runs, returns pass/quarantine deterministically, and records a tamper-evident hash-chained ledger.

  • Python
  • SQLite
  • Agent safety

Personal Delegate

An AI assistant that places calls, sends email, and books appointments on your behalf — with a single dispatch chokepoint, policy gates, and human approval before any real side effect.

  • TypeScript
  • Drizzle
  • Agentic workflows

LifeOS · Storytime Dreams

Two live iOS apps on the App Store — a personal life-OS with an on-device nutrition scanner, and an AI bedtime-story generator for kids.

  • React Native / Expo
  • iOS
  • On-device AI
04

What I'm building toward

I build software that does real work — not demos. My focus is agentic systems that act safely in the real world: tools that take actions against live APIs, with guardrails, approvals, and an audit trail you can trust. I ship end to end, I hold a high bar for correctness and honesty, and I care as much about the system that catches the mistake as the feature that makes the sale. I'm looking for a team building ambitious, trustworthy AI products at scale.

Let's talk

If you're building ambitious, trustworthy AI products and need a senior engineer who ships end to end, I'd love to hear from you. Send a note below or email me at raya.meresa@gmail.com.

Email me directly at raya.meresa@gmail.com.

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