Javier Julio

Experience

Senior Lead Software Engineer - DraftKings

May 2024 - Present

• Led the year-long integration of Jackpocket into DraftKings' platform architecture, defining the consolidation strategy and driving cross-team migration of critical capabilities, decommissioning 100+ legacy API endpoints, and retiring third-party integrations; reduced technical and operational complexity with no customer impact.
• Led the migration of Jackpocket admin and operations authentication from Okta to Duo, consolidating identity infrastructure onto DraftKings standards across 300+ employees with zero production downtime.
• Led Ruby/runtime security modernization across Lottery systems, upgrading ImageMagick 6 to 7 to remediate 30+ critical vulnerabilities and to unblock three EOL technologies, enabling Ruby 3.0 to 3.4 and reducing Sidekiq memory usage from 28GB+ to 16GB.
• Implemented regression testing safeguards for critical ticket-processing workflows via image comparison validation, ensuring safe adoption of ImageMagick v7 upgrades in production.
• Drove decommissioning of legacy Jackpocket infrastructure in partnership with engineering leadership, reducing operational and cloud costs as part of DraftKings' company-wide profitability initiative.
• Defined observability standards for the Lottery Rails backend, introducing Datadog SLIs/SLOs that improved alert precision, incident response, and service reliability.

Staff Engineer, Founding Team - Jackpocket

Jun 2014 - May 2024

• Joined Jackpocket as the 6th and final member of the founding team; helped build the engineering foundation as the company scaled from 5 to 300+ employees and ultimately reached a $750M acquisition by DraftKings.
• Architected and built Jackpocket's end-to-end ACH funding and withdrawal infrastructure (with Balanced, Synapse and then Dwolla & Plaid), processing six-figure daily transaction volume per flow.
• Built and expanded the customer funding experience across ACH, credit cards, Apple Pay, Venmo, and PayPal, balancing funding conversion and customer experience against fraud, account security, reconciliation, and payment-provider constraints.
• Designed and built the CCPA/DSAR privacy platform for Jackpocket, owning end-to-end data-access and deletion workflows across 26 reports, ~20 internal domains, and 16 third-party providers; automated privacy-safe data handling, approval controls, OneTrust integration, and operational alerts for Legal, Support, and QA.
• Built customer-facing responsible gaming controls for spending/funding limits and self-exclusion, defining cooling-off periods, eligibility rules, notifications, and enforcement across purchases, funding, subscriptions, and administrative workflows.
• Designed and built an account-closure experience that coordinated payment, account-status and lottery drawing checks to determine eligibility, trigger refunds when required, and, once eligible, removed payment methods, disabled subscriptions, and deleted personal data.
• Led the migration of Jackpocket's regulatory reporting pipeline from Rails & Postgres to GCF & BigQuery, reducing large-scale report generation to seconds and improving reliability for state-mandated compliance deadlines across multiple jurisdictions.
• Rebuilt the development pipeline around trunk-based development, feature flags, and parallel tests, cutting CI from 20→4 minutes, Rails test suite from 18→2 minutes, and deployments from 50+ minutes to under 10 while increasing code coverage from 73%→97%.
• Established automated security and code-quality controls across 20+ repositories, introducing linting, coverage, secrets detection, static analysis, and short-lived scoped GitHub App tokens.
• Designed and shipped a decoupled content architecture for jackpocket.com and blog.jackpocket.com, each on its own Zesty CMS instance, enabling non-engineering teams to independently own content creation, publishing, and SEO strategy.

Contract - WordLab (Jackpocket)

Sept 2014 - Dec 2014

Created an iOS app in Swift for learning words using flash cards in the Leitner system. Created a Ruby script to parse the public domain Webster dictionary to populate the initial Realm database.

Senior Software Developer - 9mmedia

Apr 2010 - May 2014

• Contributed to FitnessBuilder's iOS 8 rewrite by porting the Metrics feature and rewriting over 50 SQL queries to CoreData.
• Implemented MyFDB redesign with focus on images for content, new onboarding flow and social features: profiles, collecting, following, sharing, infinite scroll feeds, etc. Rails 3.2 app on Heroku using Postgres, AWS, Solr and Redis.
• Increased average MyFDB site duration time to 4 minutes from lowest average of 40 seconds. Decreased bounce rate by 40%.
• Optimized MyFDB pages that had 90+ queries down to 5 or less. Rendering times reduced from 3 seconds to 400ms without caching. Average 500ms app server response time (NewRelic) was cut in half.
• Increased FitnessBuilder conversion rates by syncing user and transaction data to Salesforce then ActOn to create plan specific campaigns to email users throughout their trial.
• Planned, managed, and developed the FitnessBuilder web app using Flex 4.5, Swiz, Ruby on Rails and RubyAMF.
• Developed a Flex 4 and Swiz admin for the FitnessClass iPad app.
• Created and maintained four in house Flex libraries for custom MX, Spark and RPC components.

Developer - Arc90

Sept 2007 - Apr 2010

• Developed Flex modules and custom components using PureMVC for a RESTful insurance policy origination platform that allowed multi-tasking for underwriters to manage the policy lifecycle and agents to track changes.
• Rewrote the Readability bookmarklet content parser to search based on keywords in attributes and to use a scoring system to determine content container from multiple results.
• Developed an insurance policy scoring analysis management app using Flex, PureMVC, ColdFusion and AMF that dynamically created reports in Excel with data retrieved from SQL Server stored procedures.
• Developed Question Picker for McGraw Hill, a cross browser, single page AJAX app with jQuery that used nested categories, dynamic modal windows, and complex addition/removal of questions.

Developer - AboutWeb

Oct 2005 - Sept 2007

• Developed a CMS with template, document and element versioning as a ColdFusion 8, Model Glue app for the NIH.
• Redesigned AboutWeb site from ground up using web standards.
• Developed class management tool for Intelliworks in their ColdFusion based CRM app for Higher Education.
• Enhanced a Model Glue, ColdFusion, Flash form based app for AAO where doctors can submit research papers with peer review.

Developer - Katrina Lost

Sept 2005 - Dec 2005

Developed a ColdFusion app (volunteer project) to help Hurricane Katrina victims find missing relatives and available housing. Built over a weekend. 179,000 visitors on launch day. Used 10GB of bandwidth in 10 days.

Webmaster - ESS

Jun 2005 - Oct 2005

Updated ESS and ESS Expo sites using web standards (source ordering, no tables for layout) and new ASP backends for improved SEO and maintenance.

Web Intern - World Resources Institute

Apr 2004 - Apr 2005

Replaced the site tree navigation with a cross browser, drop down menu. Worked on several ColdFusion apps.

Skills

Languages: Ruby, JavaScript, Shell, HTML, CSS, REST, JSON, Python, Elixir, Swift, Objective-C, AS3, MXML, ColdFusion

Frameworks: Rails, React, Svelte, Ember, Realm, Flex, Swiz, PureMVC

Tools: Git, Postgres, Redis, Docker, RabbitMQ, Figma, Sketch

Education

Montgomery College
A.A.S., Web Programming Degree - 3.57 GPA (2001-2005)

• Hispanic Student Achievement Award
• Computer Applications Academic Achievement Award
• Best Final Project Award in Advanced ColdFusion
• Best Final Project Award in ColdFusion

Presentations

• CSS: Cosmetic Content Without The Bloat (2013)
• Building Maintainable Applications with PureMVC (various 2009-2010)
• Using Flex Frameworks to Build Data Driven Applications (2009)
• Building ColdFusion Applications with Framework One (2010)
• Digging Through the Flex Framework (various 2009-2010)

Certifications

• Flex 2: Data & Communications (Adobe Certified Training)
• Flex 2: Developing Rich Client Applications (Adobe Certified Training)