Javier Julio

Javier Julio

Software Engineer

Experience

Senior Lead Software Engineer - DraftKings

May 2024 - Present

  • Led the strategy and execution of a year-long post-acquisition platform consolidation initiative to integrate Jackpocket into DraftKings' architecture, driving cross-team efforts to decommission 100+ legacy API endpoints, migrate critical capabilities to successor platforms, and retire third-party integrations. Reduced operational complexity and technical debt while enabling faster platform evolution with no customer impact.
  • Led enterprise authentication migration from Okta to Duo across 300+ employees supporting Lottery admin and operations systems, consolidating identity infrastructure onto DraftKings standards with zero downtime during production operations.
  • Led security and runtime modernization initiative upgrading ImageMagick from v6 to v7, remediating 30+ critical vulnerabilities and unblocking 3 EOL technologies, enabling Ruby upgrade from 3.0 to 3.4 and stabilizing Sidekiq memory usage (28GB → 16GB).
  • Implemented regression testing safeguards for critical ticket-processing workflows via image comparison validation, ensuring safe adoption of ImageMagick v7 upgrades in production systems.
  • Partnered with leadership to decommission legacy Jackpocket infrastructure, reducing operational and cloud costs as part of company-wide profitability initiatives.
  • Defined and implemented observability standards for the Lottery Rails backend by introducing Datadog SLOs/SLIs, improving alert precision, incident response quality, and service reliability.

Staff Engineer, Founding Team - Jackpocket

Jun 2014 - May 2024

  • Founding engineer contributing to scaling Jackpocket from early-stage startup to 200+ employees, helping build the engineering foundation that enabled its $750m acquisition by DraftKings.
  • Architected and built end-to-end ACH payment and withdrawal infrastructure (with Balanced, Synapse and then Dwolla & Plaid), processing six-figure daily transaction volume per flow.
  • Expanded payment capabilities by implementing credit card and Apple Pay flows and leading PayPal and Venmo integrations, increasing user conversion.
  • Led regulatory reporting pipeline migration from Rails & Postgres to GCF & BigQuery, enabling generation of large-scale compliance reports in seconds and improving reliability for on-time delivery to meet state-mandated deadlines across multiple jurisdictions.
  • Reduced Rails monolith CI pipeline time from 20 to 4 minutes and test suite execution from 18 to 2 minutes through parallelization and test optimization, while increasing code coverage from 73% to 97%, significantly improving release velocity and confidence.
  • Reduced deployment latency from 50+ minutes to under 10 minutes via trunk-based development, parallel tests, and feature flags.
  • Implemented organization-wide security and code quality automation workflows (linting, code coverage, secrets detection, static analysis, typos), improving consistency and reliability across 20+ repositories.
  • Eliminated insecure GitHub PAT usage by migrating to GitHub App-based authentication with short-lived, scoped tokens, improving security posture across engineering workflows.
  • Led migrations of jackpocket.com and the Jackpocket Blog to Zesty CMS and designed a decoupled content architecture, enabling non-engineering teams to independently own the full content lifecycle, including creation, publishing, and SEO strategy.
  • Standardized API documentation using OpenAPI and Redocly, implementing CI-enforced validation and publishing workflows that documented 100+ endpoints and improved cross-team development efficiency.
  • Eliminated manual coordination of iOS and Android staging builds by creating a GitHub Actions-based registry that allowed dependent repositories to automatically retrieve and test against the latest mobile releases.
  • Built tooling to provision lightweight staging database snapshots for local development, improving onboarding speed and accelerating local development workflows.

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, Python, Shell, Elixir, HTML, CSS, Swift, Objective-C, AS3, MXML, REST, JSON, 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)