Christiam E. Camacho

Software Engineering Technical Lead

• Architected and guided the implementation of ElasticBLAST: a cloud-native application to run BLAST on large query data sets (100,000+ bases/residues) under active development. Received positive initial feedback.
• Architected and implemented a system to perform daily updates of biological sequence databases onto GCP and AWS (~800GB total and growing).
• Delivered a cloud/on-prem hybrid system that runs BLAST workloads on AWS during peak hours, reducing the idle time of on-prem computational resources.
• Delivered the BLAST AMI in the AWS Marketplace, which is used 10,000+ hours/month.
• Automated the multi-platform builds for the BLAST+ command line applications in a CI pipeline, freeing 1-2 FTEs from manual and error prone activities.
• Trained teammates in cloud technologies and tools resulting in increased productivity, greater breadth of expertise in my team, and reduced maintenance costs.
• Spearheaded contributions to open source code projects (BioConda, HomeBrew, BioPython, BioJava, BioPerl) and co-led development teams in codeathons, resulting in greater end-user engagement.

BLAST Strategy Team Member

• Contribute to strategic direction, product management, and roadmap planning for the BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) suite of products, which has an NPS consistently above 77 (highest in the organization).
• Launched a social media communications plan for BLAST and established it as a successful model to engage end-users, achieving very high Twitter engagement rates (0.1-1%) and reaching 16,000-40,000 impressions.
• Serve as deputy BLAST team lead, ensuring continuity of operations.

Agile Project Manager/Scrum Master

• Delivered a software project management specification tailored to the organization, resulting in greater uniformity in project management activities.
• Introduced agile development practices to my team, decreasing the time to deliver functionality to stakeholders while providing greater transparency.

Senior Software Engineer

• Spearheaded the development of the BLAST+ command line applications - one of the most widely used tools for sequence alignment in the world (publication cited over 15,000 times, downloaded 50,000+ in the 6 months following each release).
• Developed server applications to run the BLAST web service, which serves ~200,000 searches/day and ranks in the top 5% most used web sites in the U.S. government.
• Trained my team in software engineering best practices: design and code reviews, unit and regression testing, refactoring, and implemented automated build, test, documentation, and software metrics systems which enhanced the quality of the software produced. As a result my team became a pioneer and desirable model for testing practices at the organization and I was invited to share these best practices by means of department-wide seminars.

Software Engineer

• Productized BLAST database update system, which manages the public and in-house distribution of BLAST databases containing terabytes of biological sequence data which doubles in size every 1.5-2 years.
• Developed multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris Sparc/Intel) QA system for BLAST command line applications, reducing the number of software defects.

Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering