Garret Wilson Resume

Email
garret@globalmentor.com
WWW
https://www.garretwilson.com/

Summary

Garret is a software application architect with over 30 years of experience in designing and implementing enterprise-level Internet applications using Java, TypeScript, and Python. A former Amazon Web Services security AI software engineer and LinkedIn developer, he builds distributed, cloud-native systems with agentic workflows. He is defined by innovation—from co-authorship of the ebook format that now feeds the Amazon Kindle publishing workflow to the recent Jekt™ context architecture for managing project-level context for humans and AI agents. He excels in working with offshore teams; is comfortable both as a lead developer and as a teacher; and has multi-language fluency.

Highlights

Core Expertise

AI
AI application architecture, context engineering, agent harness design.
Front-End
AngularJS, React, Vue.js, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS
Back-End
Low-level servers, Azure, AWS: Bedrock, Lambda, S3, IAM, Cognito, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, ECS, SageMaker, Step Functions, CloudFormation/SAM/CDK
Languages
Java (Spring, Hibernate), TypeScript, Python, C++, C#, Rust
Data Storage/Transfer
SQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB/DocumentDB, RESTful APIs, GraphQL
Distributed Data
Apache Kafka, Spark, Hadoop
Tools/Practices
Domain-Driven Design (DDD), Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), CI/CD

Current Work

Experience

Amazon Web Services (AWS) (January 2024 – February 2025; Software Development Engineer)
  • Migrated automated deployment of application to new build framework, cutting region setup time by 80% while reducing manual errors.
  • Collaborated with Applied Scientists and Security Engineers to implement internal tools necessary for delivering AI-driven enterprise security solutions.
  • Designed and implemented procedures for automated rollout of internal application into new AWS regions.
LinkedIn (January 2021 – June 2022; Senior Software Developer Consultant)
Global Relay (June 2019 – January 2021; Senior Software Developer)
  • Worked on the core proprietary distributed data platform providing regulatory compliance solutions for financial institutions worldwide.
  • Added new low-level features to the in-house distributed data storage implementation.
  • Transformed and enriched data via Kafka to data lakes.
  • Used distributed tracing and log monitoring for system analytics and alerts.
Intrexon Corporation, South San Francisco, California USA (August 2016 – September 2018; Software Development Consultant)
Led a team, including an offshore developer, to create lab automation software for Intrexon Energy Partners, managing the project from inception through several releases.
Affymetrix, Inc. (now part of Thermo Fisher), Santa Clara, California USA (February 2012 – December 2015; November 2007 – November 2010; Software Development Consultant)
Formed part of a small team designing and implementing the Chromosome Analysis Suite (ChAS) Java software for visualizing genomic data as part of the cytogenetics product—still used today for research and diagnosis, and appears in medical journals.
Archimedes, Inc., San Francisco, California USA (March 2012 – June 2014; Software Development Consultant)
Parsed and processed customer health data from health care industry standard formats.
Navigenics, Inc., Foster City, California USA (November 2010 – November 2011; Software Development Consultant)
Designed and implemented a multi-time-zone scheduling component and a monthly subscription billing system.
Grey San Francisco, San Francisco, California USA (June 2005 – May 2007; Consultant)
Served as technical lead on the Wellpoint Blue Cross of California small business insurance project, guiding a team of offshore developers in China (including in-person mentoring in Shanghai).
Texas Instruments, Inc., Dallas, Texas USA (May 2002 – 2003; Consultant)
Designed the ebook storage format of the first version of the TI-Navigator, a wireless classroom network system for distributing educational material to TI hardware devices.
WebTelecom, Inc., Pleasanton, California USA (May 2000 – March 2001; Contracted Senior Developer)
Led a team for creating from scratch a transport stack for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the successor to the H.323 voice signaling protocol.
J. F. L. Peripheral Solutions, Inc., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (December 1997 – April 1998; Contracted Senior Programmer)
Responsible for creating the majority of each TWAIN scanner driver for the Bell & Howell scanner models Copiscan II, Copiscan 4000 series, and Copiscan 8000 series.
GlobalMentor, Inc. (1999–present; CEO)

Technical Achievements

Java 1.0/1.1/1.2/1.3/1.4/5.0/6.0/7/8/9/11/17/25
I have extremely deep Java expertise. I found and reported several core Java bugs including JDK-8218280, an off-by-one error in underlying line buffering I/O that had apparently existed for decades.
C/C++
I created an object-oriented framework to wrap low-level TWAIN scanner access, which became part of commercial scanner drivers.
Apache Hadoop
Microsoft uses my Java-native decorator class for Hadoop FileSystem in the official Microsoft Azure SDK for Spark tests, allowing Spark usage on Windows without the need for third-party binaries.
Apache Thrift
Interfaced with a Thrift-based RPC mechanism for enriching data as part of a Kafka pipeline. Within days of looking at the Thrift source code, I reported and fixed bug THRIFT-4857 in which a core Thrift class violated Java consistency rules for hash code and equality.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
I wrote the Guise™ Mummy static site generator from nothing, including automatic deployment to AWS: Route 53 DNS routing to a CloudFront distribution using AWS Certificate Manager SSL/TLS certificates for multiple S3 buckets, with apex domain support. Currently deploying VPCs, subnets, and Docker containerized services with Amazon Elastic Container Registry via CloudFormation.

Education

Personal Projects

Flange™ (GitHub)
An application framework for a well-designed Java monolith that can run locally in a single JVM or be deployed transparently as a distributed, elastic, cloud-native application.
Datimprint (GitHub)
A tool to help ensure data backups are accurate and detect corruption.
Guise™ Mummy (GitHub)
A static site generator written from scratch.
Guise™ Skeleton (GitHub)
A custom CSS framework written from scratch.

Speaking

AWS Community Day Tulsa (2026-08-22)
I presented “Context Engineering on AWS” explaining how prompt engineering has transitioned to a more comprehensive discipline, and illustrated the design of an AI agent on AWS using plain services as well as Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.
ApacheCon NA 2019 (2019-09-10)
In Las Vegas I gave the presentation “Serving Clean URLs via Custom Internet Media Types on Tomcat” describing how my Guise™ Mummy serves resources without extensions directly as HTML using embedded Tomcat.
SouJava Campinas Meetup (2018-08-23)
In Campinas, Brazil I presented “Confound: Simple and solid configuration foundation for Java”, introducing and explaining my recently released Confound library.
Seattle Java User Group (2017-05-16)
Unveiling of my new SURF format in “From JSON to SURF in Java”.
San Francisco Java User Group (2016-08-10)
Introduction to Java internationalization and presentation of the Rincl library.
Tulsa Tech Fest 2016 (2016-08-05)
Oklahoma technical training conference. My two sessions were Unicode Processing in Java and Internationalizing Java Applications.

Bibliography

Patents

Specifications

Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) 1.0.1 (2001-07-02; Co-Author, Maintenance Sub-Group Chair)
A specification for representing the content of electronic books. OEBPS 1.0.1 (available via the Wayback Machine) later became the EPUB specification.