Curriculum Vitae

Brett Ryan

Chief Data & Solutions Architect | Real-Time Decisioning

me@brettryan.dev LinkedIn | Stack Overflow | GitHub

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PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

During my over two-decade career as a solutions specialist, I’ve worked on projects from small memory-constrained devices to large, massively distributed data platforms. I have built out operational workloads that respond to real-time data problems, recently specializing at Telstra in designing customer recommendation engines, decisioning platforms, and real-time Customer Analytics Record (CAR) solutions.

As a software engineer at heart, I specialize in the Java ecosystem and have been a contributor to the NetBeans IDE team. My recent focus has been on designing efficient, reactive, near real-time data processing pipelines.

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SPEAKING & OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTION

• Open Source: Long-time supporter and test lead for the NetBeans IDE Community Acceptance Test (CAT) team.
• Community: Active contributor on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange.
• Public Projects: Various projects published to GitHub.

MENTORSHIP & INTERNAL LEADERSHIP

• Mentoring: Passionate about educating others; currently managing two official mentees while providing guidance to others who reach out.
• Events: Regular speaker and MC for Telstra Cloud Days and the Data & AI Academy.
• Knowledge Sharing: Frequent lead for brown-bag sessions and live code demonstrations.

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SKILL SUMMARY

Category	Skills
Languages	Java, Scala, ECMAScript (JavaScript), C#, Postgres, HTML, CSS, Bash, KSH, Functional Programming
Platforms	Hadoop, HDFS, Hive, Spark, Kafka, AWS (Step Functions, Lambda, Batch, DynamoDB, Redshift, Athena, Glue)
Tooling	Git, JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo, Bitbucket, Linux, Docker, Terraform

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TECHNICAL SKILLS

• Languages: Highly engaged in the Java ecosystem with notable expertise in Scala, ECMAScript, and C#.
• Data Platforms: Extensive experience in distributed platforms rooted in Hadoop HDFS for OLAP (Hive, Redshift, Athena) and orchestration tools like Apache Airflow and NiFi.
• NoSQL: Demonstrated ability building highly efficient single-table NoSQL designs using Amazon DynamoDB with reactive programming against Kinesis Data Streams.
• Architecture: Focused on event-driven solutions using Domain Driven Design (DDD) and microservices.
• DevOps: Early adopter of Git and Terraform; former member of the Atlassian “Codergeist” and “Dragon Slayers” programs. I prioritize infrastructure automation over “click-ops”.

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RECOGNITION & AWARDS (Telstra, Melbourne)

• Opolo Replacement: Led the elimination of the Opolo Pre-Paid solution, enabling strategic ML marketing decisions forecasting $14M in retention and growth revenue for FY26. Awarded a Quarterly Award of Excellence.
• MXO Replacement: Replaced Medallia Experience Orchestrator with a custom solution, saving $1M/year in OPEX and enabling real-time recommendation feedback. Awarded a Quarterly Award of Excellence.
• Dynamic Actions: Delivered machinery for real-time action assessment, allowing for enriched messaging and saturation rules. Awarded a Quarterly Award of Excellence.
• Fast Path: Developed the predecessor to CAR, enabling real-time detection and alerting for customer care activities (vulnerability, outages). Awarded a Quarterly Award of Excellence.

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PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Working within the Telstra/Accenture Joint Venture to define decision intelligence components:

• Rules Engine: Centralized repository, execution platform, and simulation engine.
• Reactive Pipelines: Eventing for real-time state management and behavior tracking.
• Optimization: Champion/Challenger and A/B testing support.

• Scalable Features: Designed a Customer Analytical Record (CAR) scaling to 35k evaluations/sec.
• Event Bus: Engineered a reactive pipeline for instant activation and timed emissions.

• Scale: Spark/Scala engine processing 1.5 billion decisions daily for 1,000+ recommendations.
• API Design: Developed the Next Best Action (NBA) APIs for omni-channel interactions.

• Led the successful software migration of operational activities to UK Greetings technology.

• Display Management System (DMS): C# WPF/CAD solution for retail design with a Java/Progress OpenEdge backend.
• Right Project System (RPS): JavaEE/Spring system managing the lifecycle of 10,000+ SKUs annually.
• Field Sales Automator (FSA): Mobile application managing 500+ merchandisers across ANZ.
• Voice Mail Automation Studio: Desktop PABX integration and call routing tool.

• Responsible for retail store layouts; designed custom software to automate planning, which led to a transition into the applications development team.