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William Russell

@williamrussell1

Senior Technical Architect at Viasat who designed a Kafka-to-Splunk automation platform replacing manual production work.

United States

Message

At Viasat, I own architecture and delivery across data platforms, satellite and production operations, and autonomous AI systems. I design and operate Palantir Foundry workloads and a production Looker-on-GCP platform while continuing hands-on software development.

I designed a microservice automation platform that replaced manual production work with services and business-rule alerts, fed by a high-bandwidth Kafka pipeline into Splunk dashboards. I also built device-login and telemetry collectors, Salesforce ticket automation, and stream-enrichment services.

As a manager and Scrum Master at Viasat, I led a team of developers and interns delivering concurrent projects, and managed overseas development and QA partners. Earlier, I built test automation platforms at Katch LLC (Healthplans.com) and Instant.ly, and shipped mobile apps as a release manager at Instant.ly.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Technical Architect

Current

Viasat

Jan 2017 - Present (9 years 9 months)

Owns architecture and delivery at the intersection of large-scale data platforms, satellite/production operations, and autonomous AI systems. Serves as manager and Scrum Master while remaining a hands-on software developer.

Palantir Foundry Trino Spark Python AWS GCP Looker Splunk Kafka React TypeScript Java Spring Boot PostgreSQL Redis Qdrant Docker Kubernetes GitHub Actions Ansible Terraform

Staff SDET

Katch LLC

Jan 2016 - Dec 2017 (1 year 11 months)

Built a scalable Java micro-framework for cross-platform test execution and delivered a runner that executed automated tests across 23 sites. Managed in-house QA and crowdsourced testing.

Java Groovy Go JavaScript Maven Jenkins Selenium Appium JMeter Sauce Labs REST TestRail

Senior SDET

Grindr

Jan 2016 - Dec 2016 (11 months)

Rewrote the core framework into reusable Maven micro-tools and introduced a polymorphic Selenium/Appium driver-session layer. Managed and trained two offshore teams and was awarded MVP for automation on the v3 release.

Java Groovy Maven Jenkins CircleCi Selenium Appium Cucumber TestNG REST TestRail

Lead Software Developer in Test

Instant.ly

Jan 2013 - Dec 2016 (3 years 11 months)

Built a Java/Spring test platform from scratch used across three product teams. Served as mobile release manager, shipping multiple Android and iOS apps and integrating an SDK into additional apps.

Java Spring Framework Selenium Appium Ruby Ruby on Rails Gradle Android iOS MySQL MongoDB REST TestRail JMeter

Senior QA Engineer

Muve Music / LEAP Wireless / Cricket Communications

Jan 2011 - Dec 2013 (2 years 11 months)

Owned Google Play releases, digital media-rights encryption testing across 20 Android handsets, and the shift from waterfall to agile QA. Stood up Jira/TestLink/Confluence and device-lab ROM flashing.