Chuck Flores - Portfolio

Throughout my career, I've had the opportunity to work on dozens of projects at various levels of responsibility. During my first ten years as a software engineer, I worked on web, console, and mobile games in the game industry. I then transitioned to the healthcare industry, where I was part of a few startups and greatly influenced the products I helped develop. I am now co-founder and architect for a cyber security startup where I've been exercising my skills much more broadly and deeply.

This page is a portfolio of some of the projects I've worked on, my responsibilities as a software engineer and architect, and my involvement with companies I've worked for. This portfolio isn't an exhaustive list but highlights some of the most impactful work I'm proud to have been involved in.

Resume available upon request.

Experience & Products

Traxiom.io

Co-Founder and Software Architect 2023 - Present

I joined Traxiom when two friends and ex-coworkers from Ripple Health Group and Rally Health needed my help and expertise. They required me to take our MVP product to the next level and make it more robust and scalable. Since then, I've rewritten most of our backend services and created new features for our web app.

As the company's acting CTO, I've also been responsible for communicating with our current and potential customers to understand their needs and how we can meet them. I've then taken these findings to create a roadmap for any necessary infrastructure changes and documented changes in cloud costs. Since most of our budget was out of pocket, keeping costs low and predictable was required.

Enveda Biosciences

Staff Software Engineer 2023

At Enveda, I had the role of increasing developer proficiency and restructuring their data pipeline to scale their machine-learning data input by several orders of magnitude. What was most challenging about this was that, since this was my first venture into biotech and the pharmaceutical industry, I needed more understanding of what was involved in the drug discovery process and how I could apply it to make their artificial intelligence predictions more accurate. So, I spent the first weeks studying the basics of what is involved in developing a new medicine, which involved learning the roles and responsibilities of biochemists and physicists in this process. I then applied this knowledge to make the data feeding into their machine-learning applications more efficient and accurate. As a result of this restructuring, it was now possible to stream much larger datasets into the databases, and they also required less transformation before the AI processes consumed them.

I also created processes to reduce the cognitive load on developers and created a framework to make creating new lab science applications faster and easier. I left Enveda knowing I had a good influence on their developers and developed a structure they can grow upon to scale reliably and quickly.

Calm

Staff Software Engineer 2020 - 2022

As one of the first members of Ripple Health Group, I helped the backend team develop the services needed to launch our mobile products. I also communicated with partnering health insurance companies to design APIs that would allow us to integrate with their systems and provide eligibility and benefits information for our users.

A lot of the tech at Ripple Health Group was built from the ground up, and it took a lot of my prior learnings from my previous experiences to build a platform that allowed us to rapidly prototype new products and features and test new tech with our present applications.

Even though the backend team at Ripple was small, we still followed best development practices that worked very well in our previous companies. Some of these practices included technical discussions around problem areas in our stack and writing and reviewing RFCs for upcoming significant areas of development and refactoring.

Calm acquired Ripple Health Group in early 2022, and I spent the following months helping to integrate our services with Calm and participating in technical discussions as part of the wider Calm engineering group.

Products

  • LikePaper Mobile Since this was Ripple Health Group's first product, I was involved with every aspect of this app's development, including some product management. This was a product that had no predecessor at the company, so the tech had to be built from the ground up. I developed many of the backend services, and authentication layers, as well as their CI/CD pipeline, and testing framework. I also setup the infrastructure as code pipeline.
  • Care Mobile Some health insurance companies were interested in integrating their benefits and eligibility information into our LikePaper app, so it was decided to create a new app specifically with enterprise integrations in mind. I was involved in the technical discussions and planning to make this happen. I communicated with many of the health insurance companies to understand their systems and APIs, and then designed the APIs that would allow us to integrate with them.
  • Calm.com After Calm acquired us in 2022, I integrated many of Calms APIs into our products and vice versa.

Rally Health

Senior Principal Software Engineer 2014 - 2020

When I started at Rally Health, the company was still in its infancy and was in the middle of pivoting to a new product and tech stack. I helped with this by migrating their backend code to RESTful APIs from server-side rendering libraries. Transitioning to RESTful APIs allowed us to transition to microservice-oriented architecture and divided our product into multiple web and mobile applications.

I then became the technical lead of the mobile development group, built the team and architecture, and helped develop one of the company's first mobile apps. Afterward, I expanded and branched out the mobile team to allow us to create five more mobile apps. These mobile apps were written natively, in React Native, or in a hybrid of both. My technical focus was not only on the development of these mobile apps but also on the design of their APIs and the architecture and health of the backend services.

As Rally grew to a much larger company, I was a member of the executive technical staff(ETS), which oversaw Rally's overall technical health and was responsible for high-level architectural discussions, reviewing and writing RFCs, and discussing any improvements or changes to Rally's development practices. The ETS became an essential part of Rally as we integrated more services and products into our backend services and as we rapidly adopted more and more users and received more requests per day.

United Health Group acquired Rally Health in 2017.

Products

  • Rally Engage Web As a full stack engineer I designed and developed Rally's first RESTful APIs and moved the company away from server-side rendered web pages.
  • Rally Engage Mobile As technical lead I developed the core architecture for the iOS and Android apps and built up the company's first mobile engineering team. I architected the backend services for the app as well as designed the session and API layers that sat between mobile and our backend infrastructure.
  • Rally Care Rally Care was our effort to make a mobile app that can allow a user to see their health insurance benefits. This required me to communicate across Rally and United Healthcare to establish secure APIs and product expectations. I used these findings to design and develop the backend architecture and APIs.
  • UnitedHealthcare Mobile A huge amount of communication and planning was involved with building United Healthcare's main mobile app. I made the technical decision to require that the mobile app be developed using React Native in order to keep United Healthcare's complex business logic unified across iOS and Android. I also worked with many backend software engineers across teams and companies to ensure that there was a robust API layer between us and UHC's digital wing(Optum Digital).
  • UnitedHealthcare V2 The second version of the United Healthcare app was a complete rewrite of the first version combined with the Rally Engage mobile features, which had numerous challenges. I performed a developer productivity analysis and concluded that this app must have an architecture that allows for the app to have both React Native components as well as natively developed components. This new architecture was a tedious and challenging solution to thoroughly plan and execute since this required analysis of how this would impact the security of the APIs and the user's private data. This new architecture also required a significant redesign of edge services and APIs for the app. This mobile app launched sometime after I left Rally. However, my work was central and critical to its success.

Zynga

Senior Software Engineer 2011 - 2014

I started at Zynga in the Zynga Dallas studio while living in the Dallas area. I helped work on our upcoming new game's core tech and Facebook integrations. After transferring to the San Francisco headquarters, I led efforts to integrate the services I created in the Dallas studio into the broader Zynga organization.

With all the teams I was involved with at Zynga, dealing with an enormous flood of requests into our systems was always at the forefront of our responsibilities and discussions. We developed many methods of ensuring that our services were optimal and secure, which I've taken with me throughout my career. Additionally, bots were a problem area that we'd focus on occasionally. Bots consumed a significant portion of our resources at Zynga, and I developed systems that identified them and isolated them to prevent their behaviors from affecting the overall game economy.

When Zynga started to focus more on mobile games, I developed core systems and CMS tech in C# and Unity.

Products

  • CastleVille I developed numerous major components of this game, but I mainly focused on the game's Facebook integration and security measures. I developed tools to allow product managers and game designers to easily add social and viral features to the game. Additionally, I developed systems to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and spamming.
  • Farmville 3 For the Farmville 3 mobile game I developed core systems and CMS tech in C# and Unity. This CMS tech allowed game designers to easily add new content to the game without needing to update the app. Additionally, the system integrated with a database service that allowed product and business analysts to easily track the performance of the game's content. This also allowed the oppurtunity to integrate machine-learning models to predict the performance of new content. Even though this game released a long while after I left Zynga, my work was still a part of the game's architecture.

Rocket Gaming Systems

Software Engineer 2008 - 2011

I joined Rocket Gaming Systems and helped integrate Rocket's tech with the newly acquired tech from Ihsoft. In addition, I led efforts to research and develop new hardware solutions that Rocket was interested in using in upcoming slot machine games.

To ensure the quality of the slot machines once they're "on the floor," I developed systems that stress-tested hardware shipped directly from the manufacturer. As a result, we detected manufacturing defects early, which prevented costly maintenance overhead in casinos.

Products

  • Numerous Slot Machine Games Due to the nature of gaming development, one game code base can be skinned into many different games. So, it's difficult to name the different games I've been involved in, but it would be safe to say that I've worked on a dozen games that were skinned into 30 to 50 different games.

Paradigm Entertainment, THQ

Software Engineer 2007 - 2008

I joined Paradigm Entertainment(a THQ game studio) a few months before shipping our next console game. After the game's release, I helped develop a new game engine and a few game prototypes. My time at Paradigm was my first experience as a software engineer in a large team and company. I learned and grew a lot with the more senior and talented team members.

Products

  • Stuntman Ignition With only months left before shipping, I helped refactor the game's UI engine to reduce performance issues and bugs. I also implemented a few new features that the game's designers requested.