Wm. Ruffin Bailey

Solutions Architect / Lead Engineer / Toptal Consultant | 2024 – Present

rufwork.com, LLC | Toptal Matching

Note: All tasks in this section use AI, even when clients do not have an AI budget, in that case most often as a "pair programming" aid.

• Architecture Modernization:
  • Upgraded legacy enterprise desktop and web architectures to .NET Standard, establishing clean, maintainable paths for seamless integration with modern code and cloud deployments.
• Microservices & API Infrastructure:
  • Designed and delivered high-performance backend ecosystems using C#, ASP.NET Web APIs, AWS SQS, MongoDB, and MySQL to process secure financial verification data for state government benefit programs.
• Data Integration & Engines:
  • Engineered high-throughput report-generation features—including pixel-perfect PDF engines and automated data export pipelines—serving 600+ public safety and engineering agencies.
• Test-Driven Refactoring:
  • Introduced dependency injection patterns to historically monolithic codebases, implementing automated testing suites using XUnit to push system code coverage to 99+% for new code and 50+% for refactored files.
• Agentic AI Product Delivery (MxDiff):
  • Leveraged a state-of-the-art agentic AI workflow, architecting context-mapped code pipelines via the Aider harness, Claude Sonnet, and GitHub Copilot (chat & GitHub Desktop) to rapidly engineer & deploy a macOS developer desktop app written with Electron on the Mac App Store.

Tech Lead / Full-Stack Developer | 2020 – 2024

Hawkes Learning Systems | Higher Education SaaS

• The Situation:
  • Needed to move Hawkes Learning Systems' core instructor-facing SaaS tool (Test Builder) away from a monolithic, "working museum" tech framework into an concern-separated, high-performance architecture.
  • Hired as tech lead for both backend API isolation and frontend modernization.
• Monolith Decoupling & Backend Isolation:
  • Architected and executed the migration of a monolithic "working museum" codebase via a "strangler fig pattern" to an independent, high-performance ASP.NET Core Web API, microservice and cloud-hosting ready stack utilizing secure, token-based authentication via custom middleware (to merge most easily with legacy logic).
• Modern Frontend Transformation:
  • Researched, documented, and successfully introduced teams to a modern React frontend stack powered by Vite (and tested with Vitest) to replace dated single-page app frameworks.

Project Lead / Modernization Architect | 2018 – 2020

Blackbaud | Enterprise Cloud Software

• Project Focus:
  • Inherited a floundering 3-year, seven-million dollar, multi-team rewrite of Blackbaud's flagship Grantmaking platform which had yet to create a basic entity entry (only updated existing data).
  • Competitors were marketing against the obsolete stack.
• Strategic Turnaround
  • Proposed a targeted MVP to beat the hard Silverlight end-of-life deadline, resulting in an immediate promotion from Team Lead to Project Lead across 4 development teams.
  • Replaced the mismatched Cosmos DB NoSQL hosting what was still a relational datastore and instead kept the mature, complex C#/CSLA.NET/SQL Server powered business logic and data tier.
  • Created a translation layer for request rerouting to legacy CSLA which could integrate with other Blackbaud ASP.NET Core microservices, Cosmos DB proxies, Blackbaud Single Sign-On (SSO), and other modern company services outside of Grantmaking.
• UI Modernization & Rapid Delivery:
  • Ported the legacy presentation layer directly to Angular using an 80/20 mentality, leveraging the old Silverlight UI as a high-fidelity prototype rather than wasting cycles reconceiving the system from scratch.
• Project Leadership:
  • Established cross-functional design/PM/dev triads to accelerate planning and decision-making and owned story preparation for teams' backlog grooming.
  • Aligned release milestone scheduling with Grantmaking directorship and company leadership.
  • Spliced offshore/on-site communication gaps by attending offshore standups and bringing a key offshore dev to the local office to anchor translation and coordination.
• The Outcome:
  • Delivered a running system supporting full entity CRUD in a modern, Angular-powered UI within a few months, safeguarding the platform's revenue and delivering what the previous three-year effort could not.

Team Lead / Senior Software Engineer | Past Core Focus

PeopleMatter | Workforce SaaS

• Project Focus:
  • Less than four weeks from a major enterprise release of PeopleMatter's scheduling module, performance completely cratered on a key "homepage logo" client's out of date workstations due to a heavy infinite-scroll rendering.
  • Weeks from a massive contracted enterprise release of the core scheduling module, presentation performance cratered on a key "homepage logo" client's outdated workstations due to complex client-side functionality combined with infinite scroll.
  • Tasked to rapidly diagnose and implement a recovery patch without blowing the contract deadline.
• Performance Engineering:
  • With one designer and in two sprints, wrote a highly defensive, conditional browser-sniffing engine that swapped out the scroll mechanics for a lightweight, configurable paging architecture for the logo client -- with the ability to turn paging on and dial sizes up or down if other clients required it after rollout.
• Zero-Server Churn:
  • Deployed the optimization exclusively through a conditional, client-side browser-sniffing configuration engine, requiring zero backend/server-side structural churn.
• The Outcome:
  • Shipped the application on time to all clients, successfully meeting contractual deadlines and client metrics required for the company's next critical round of venture capital funding.