Cedric Williams
Principal-level Engineer | Legacy Modernization | Platforms | AI-Assisted Engineering
About
Principal-level engineer with nearly 20 years in financial systems. I prototype new systems, refactor legacy ones into shape, and turn the experiments that work into production platforms. Recent work: building a sandboxed AI agent platform for shared, multi-person exploration of any system in the company, rearchitecting a .NET monolith for 30+ services, and reducing critical money moving system deploys from hours to under 30 minutes.
Work Experience
Software Engineer 5 (Senior Staff equivalent)
Prototyped and productized internal platforms for a banking-as-a-service company.
Highlights
- Built an internal AI agent platform from a hackathon port of OpenInspect into a full product. Shared sessions let engineers and business staff observe, debug, and prototype against any system in the org; per-repository sandboxes come online in under a minute, with Claude Code agents under a custom command-and-control API.
- Designed and rolled out a LaunchDarkly integration library that simplified the API and standardized context construction and flag evaluation, so targeted flag rules always behave the same across services.
- Built an accounting workflow management system, banking core test and audit tools, a Go application platform, an OpenSearch integration library, and common applications to use each.
Principal Engineer (retitled Senior Staff)
Modernized core systems and engineering infrastructure through 5x company growth.
Highlights
- Refactored a 100+ module .NET monolith with no separation of concerns into team- and function-aligned modules, enabling 30+ microservices to be extracted without breaking the monolith application or any api contract.
- Re-platformed the money movement applications: containerized them, added code and configuration versioning, added runtime observability, and specified a dedicated PCI-segregated Kubernetes cluster. Build-and-deploy dropped from two hours to under 30 minutes, with automated canary deploys and parallel versions under live load for performance comparison.
- Built and shipped OTP login verification in about 72 hours with one other engineer, during an active mass account-takeover attack.
- Rebuilt multiple build system pipelines to be version-aware, idempotent, and reproducible; moved most CI/CD off Windows-based Jenkins onto GitHub Actions with custom actions and workflows; built a developer site exposing logs, reports, and metadata for any historical build.
- Replaced a struggling identity provider integration with a new solution rolled out to millions of user accounts with two other engineers.
- Created reference implementations adopted across teams for semantic versioning and build metadata, deploy-linked configuration, and event emitters/consumers. Launched a Backstage portal with SRE that standardized application discovery and auto-provisioned standard alerts for API services, queue processors, and datastores.
Member of Technical Staff, Technology Leadership Program, InnerSource Advocate
Developer platform engineering, then technical leadership and engineering culture programs.
Highlights
- Built company-wide refactoring and re-engineering programs (tools, training, coaching, troubleshooting) for the developer platform used by more than 4,000 engineers shipping 2,200 services in five languages.
- Built point-in-time build artifact freezing so teams could constrain dependency churn through their development cycle.
- Selected for the Technology Leadership Program (2013-2015), with rotations across technology, management, and leadership roles.
- Cofounded PayPal's InnerSource program (2015-2019): built and delivered process training, contribution-policy templates and engineering metrics, resolved cross-team ownership conflicts, and documented case studies.
Senior Application Architect
Extended an online banking platform used by hundreds of banks.
Highlights
- Led OFX integration with the online banking system from design through Intuit certification; built mobile client interfaces to back-end systems.
- Owned design, estimation, and delivery of year-plus projects; extended bug tracking and automated builds; mentored new engineers.
Earlier Experience
Greenfield systems including numerical analysis to detect fraudulent annual waste reporting, source-diff analysis to find the closest ancestor of unversioned software, and a relational data loader with automated attribute extraction. Also GIS development and instruction, legislative reporting, industrial distribution systems, and SMB networking and automation.
Contact
Sunnyvale, California US
Education
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Cornell University
Bachelor of Science
Natural Resources
-
Texas State University
Masters Certificate Program
Computer Science
Certificates
-
Federal Aviation Administration
Private Pilot
Communities
Cofounder
Cofounded the global community applying open source practices inside companies. Served six years on the board; spoke at about a dozen industry conferences; created and ran the first six InnerSource conferences.
Skills
practices
legacy modernization
monolith decomposition
rapid prototyping
platform engineering
CI/CD and build systems
agentic engineering
feature flagging
PCI-scoped infrastructure
technologies
Go
TypeScript
Python
C# / .NET
Java
Claude Code
AWS
Kubernetes
Helm
Terraform
GitHub Actions
Backstage
LaunchDarkly
OpenSearch
MySQL
Redis