Senior System Engineer/QA Analyst, June 2013 – Present

DrFirst Inc. Rockville, Maryland, United States

As a senior system engineer and lead QA analyst, led all aspects of quality assurance implementing and deploying key IT applications and Services in the Healthcare Industry, enabling the capability of electronic prescribing and healthcare information sharing between Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), providers/hospitals, pharmacies, and patients.  These programs create the interoperability infrastructure and management tools that streamline healthcare operations and clinical workflow. Overseeing all aspects of quality assurance including establishing metrics, providing QA services, coordinating QA resources internally and externally in an Agile/Scrum environment, and ensuring the team is following the process and using industry-accepted best practices.  Led and mentored QA team members and multiple off-shore tester teams, developing and executing test cases, scripts, plans, and procedures, as well as developing new tools to enable automation and improved quality goal compliance. Maintained liaison with senior management and briefing of status and issues. Examples:

·               QA Lead for EPCS (Electronic prescribing of controlled substances): Initially funded by AHRQ (The Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality), EPCS creates nation’s first management tool of its kind. EPCS enables providers electronic authentication and registration as well as a controlled substance signing, and thus help prescribers to prescribe more efficiently and accurately and makes it much easier to track and audit drug usage within an individual practice as well as a large group. EPCS uterlizes Representational State Transfer (Restful) services, Web-enabled interfaces, audit service using MongoDB, digital signature and leading two-factor authentication technologies(including Symantec Validation & IDP Protection Security Token, Imprivata’s biometric two-factor authentication and RSA SecurID), to help monitor prescription drug abuse and reduce improper prescribing practices and stop pill mills. As the EPCS QA Lead, led developing test plans, defining test cases, automating test scripts through Jmeter, Selenium, and tracking defects/bugs/tasks through JIRA, performing root-cause analysis and problem diagnosis.  In charge of release signoffs including test environment setup, network security configuration, Validation, Functional, Integration, Regression, GUI, Back-end, and onsite/offshore coordination.  Oversaw all aspects of quality assurance in the entire Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) from requirement gathering to releasing to production and customer support.

·               QA Lead for EPCS Router: To enable e-prescribing of both controlled and non-controlled substances in general, the EPCS Router aims to provide the capability of routing and mediating both CS and Non-CS prescriptions between EPCS, Rcopia Web, and a broad range of DrFirst’s Partner Program participants, and thus allowing them to access a full range of e-prescribing functionality. In addition, the Pharmacy Loader populates the pharmacy information into Database from Surescript (the national clearinghouse used by e-prescribing platforms to submit prescriptions to pharmacies) and Emdeon (provider of clinical information exchange solutions), and the Drug Loader populates drug information into Database from FDB (First Databank).  Provided oversight in all aspects of quality assurance in the development and deployment of EPCS Router, Pharmacy Loader, and Drug Loader.  Served as the customer interface and the liaison between product manager, development team, and partners. Established procedures and operating methodologies to determine levels of customer satisfaction and advance the project goals.  Maintained frequent communication cross functional teams including QA, Developers, DBA, network engineers, BTA and Customer Support to define clarity of team responsibilities and procedures to ensure on-time QA signoff.

Senior Engineer, November 2006 - January 2013

TeleCommunication Systems, Inc.  Annapolis, Maryland, United States

Lead engineer for several initiatives and growths across multiple product lines, teams and third-party vendors.  Interacted with clients and partners to understand the technical and business issues.  Performed hands-on system engineering process transforming business use cases and requirements into system specifications and functional requirements.  Attended to details in all phases of project life cycle including MBSE UML/SysML modeling, high and low level designs, software construction, unit testing, integration, load and reliability testing, performance analysis, release cutover, and maintenance. Obtained extensive working experiences with telecom network infrastructure, IP networks, converged NextGen networks, IT security, cloud computing, service interoperability, and enterprise management. Examples include:

·               STE (Secure the Edge): I have been responsible for crafting alternative architectures that provide end-to-end security protection of voice and text message communications between mobile devices on edge networks. The proposed Secure the Edge portfolio augments mobile security policies with secure mobile device containers and communication protocols such as TLS, IPsec with IKE, SRTP, HSM, NSA Suite B Cryptographic algorithms, and XMPP. More specifically, for Secure Messaging Capability, I adopted XMPP as the communication protocol without precedence within TCS product line. I leveraged security components built into the core XMPP specification to implement strong security via Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) and TLS. TLS in XMPP helps to encrypt the data and prevents tampering and eavesdropping. The SASL as a second security protocol on top of TLS helps in validating the end parties, so that only authenticated users are allowed to carry on the client-server or the server-server communication.  Mutual authentication and confidentiality is maintained. For Secure Voice Capability, I leveraged IPsec with IKE, SIP over TLS and SRTP, and FIPS140-2 compliant HSM that provides reliable protection of cryptographic keys.

·               TMM (Total Mobility Management): Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seeks a full managed service solution to secure, monitor, manage, and support wireless devices and services within the enterprise. I proposed a SOA-based architecture for TMM that supports Cellular Wireless Managed Service (CWMS) portal to enable centralized mobility management across the organization through a single access point, leveraging open standard interfaces and Apache ServiceMix Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to route, mediate, and integrate distinct data models and subsystems, such as Mobile Device Management (MDM), Telecom Expenses Management (TEM), Reporting, and Help Desk Support, etc.  Apache Camel routing and mediation engine was used to implement content based routing and message transformation through integrating various EIPs supported by Camel as part of the call flows, such that End-to-End service usage and data synchronization can be achieved between the MDM, TEM, and Reporting components without proprietary interfaces. The areas that I have addressed also include security requirements, system vulnerabilities, and FISMA and FIPS 140-2 compliance. I led the prototype design how to support PIV HSPD-12/CAC login with different credentialing systems for federated identity and access controls across different organizations and agencies within DHS.

·               CMAS (Commercial Mobile Alert System): I have been extensively attended to the details in the life cycle development of cell broadcast alerts over CDMA, GSM, UMTS and LTE based on J-STD 101 protocol. I teamed with marketing/sale/product Leads responded and won numerous CMAS RFPs including CMAS solution for CBW UMTS network and for PBS Satellite network. To support the production of the RFP awards, I have conducted technical evaluations and partnered with cross-functional teams during joint production efforts such as defining the new requirements and Acceptance Test Plan, implementation, network integration, deployment, configuration and contingency plan for both in-network and hosted deployments.

·               SMSC (Short Message Service Center): TCS SMSC has been created as a fully integrated and standards-based end-to-end messaging solution across traditional SS7, ATM, SIGTRAN, mobile broadband and Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. Deployed in major wireless service provider telecom networks nation-wide, SMSC is responsible for one-third of entire text message traffic in US, e.g., delivering nearly 850 billion text messages in 2010 alone. I have been simultaneously supporting different SMSC releases with multiple service providers inside and outside the US, such as Verizon SMSC LTE, IMS and EVDO deployment, TNZ CDMA/UMTS Dual Mode Release, and MoviStar Venezuela CDMA/GSM Dual Network. For each release I have extensively worked on technical planning, system integration, verification, validation, cost and risk analysis, supportability and effectiveness analysis, etc. I identified the needs of the efficiency improvement and crafted cluster architecture designs based on network performance testing and field traffic statistics. Such high-availability architectures enhanced SMSC’s scalable capacity while significantly simplified interface to the rest of the network. I also developed and presented in-depth system architecture and performance training materials to key customers. The new approach I came up to enable Prepaid Short Message Services Revenue Capture has led to patent granted by the US Patent Office. 

·               To promote the awareness of TCS products and intellectual properties, I have regularly represented TCS in several standard bodies, such as ATIS, 3GPP2, and OASIS, in numerous cases, directly contributing to the development of specifications, such as contributions have been standardized in 3GPP2 specification X.S0048-0 v1.0/TIA-1109 SMS over IMS. The solution in the exampled contributions enabled TCS to provide a fast and robust solution to the US largest wireless provider’s SMS over 4G LTE launch in 2010. On the other hand, I have conducted briefings to TCS senior management and business coalitions about the trends and updates in on-going specifications, to help TCS products and strategies better synchronize with newest specification developments.

System Engineer, November 2004 - November 2006

TeleCommunication Systems, Inc.

·               Dedicated SE for SMSC in several milestone architectures, such as the Geo Diverse Mated Pair Architecture. My main responsibilities include defining functional and software configuration requirements, providing implementation recommendation to development team, and establishing test plans, test scripts and guidance for Quality Assurance (QA). For example, I specified SMSC mated pair architecture and operations to achieve improved reliability and availability.

·               Led rigorous testing required to deploy the SMSC in the telecommunications network, which requires Telco Carrier Grade Certification with 99.999% reliability, high availability with no single point of failure, and high performance. The test covers functional, network reliability and performance testing. I created test scenarios that insert fault conditions to simulate software/hardware component failures, describe the expected behavior to failure conditions as well as how the system recovers. I further analyzed system performance metrics, capacity measurement and system health statistics and provided system capacity reports and recommendation, capacity planning and performance guidance to management teams and customers.

Software Developer, September 1999 - November 2004

TeleCommunication Systems, Inc.

·               Implemented key functions of SMSC, LBS and E9-1-1 and developed new testing drivers, tools and simulators using Shell Scripting and C/C++, JAVA, PERL, SQL etc.

·               Prepared detailed documentation of designs, implementation steps, test plans, and standard operating procedures. Performed the integration testing to ensure the system was functioned as specified.

·               Shared the knowledge and work experience gained and collaborated with other developers to set standards and define best practices for coding and design. Provide advice, directives and oversight to new developer team members.

·               Participated on-call rotation and field support for various customers including some controversial and challenge assignments.