Jorel Fermin

Jorel Fermin

Lead Software Engineer at AWS. Building cloud infrastructure tools. Shipping systems at scale for 20+ years.

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Curriculum Vitae

Experience

Lead Software Development Engineer

January 2022 to Present | Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Core contributor for the launch of OpenSearch Serverless, delivering the Shard Manager and Autoscaling components from proof of concept to general availability in production. Designed and implemented systems that enabled predictive and reactive fleet autoscaling using Chronos models, optimizing worker resource usage and reducing operational cost via standby replica management and dense shard packing. Owned critical infrastructure for workload distribution, encryption-at-rest authorization flows, and real-time metrics delivery, coordinating with cross-team stakeholders across indexing, search, and security. Led multiple design and threat modeling efforts to improve reliability, responsiveness, and operational observability of core systems, reducing shard assignment latency by 75% and lowering customer costs through smarter scaling. Trusted to lead cross-service initiatives, unblock cross-team integrations, and drive key deliverables to completion.

Lead Software Engineer

January 2006 to January 2022 | Cimpress / Vistaprint

Designed and built a globally available customer document validation and storage REST service handling 23.2k requests per minute, used as a backing service for dozens of platform merchants servicing tens of thousands of end users per minute. Designed a texture mapping process for projecting customer designs onto products with complex geometries for use by graphic designers. Created a graphical document composition engine that reduced time to market for graphical scenes from seven days to thirty minutes, powering a rendering service handling 83k requests per minute. The engine was leveraged to increase conversion rate and overall order value across the organization. Other responsibilities included ownership of document rendering, design and content management tools, front-end ASP.NET development, and Project Architect.

Software Engineer

July 2004 to January 2006 | Auspice Corporation (Arris)

Designed and developed a Java package utilizing standard design patterns that integrated the Auspice TLX platform with multi-session, multi-service instant messaging (AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber). Created test automation scripts for product testing on Linux, Solaris, and Windows platforms. After graduation, developed a PHP graphical data entry front end that managed a database of customer cable modems for one of the nation’s top cable companies.

Software Engineering Co-op

June 2003 to December 2003 | Northrop Grumman

Designed an internal manufacturing system that streamlined and digitized a paper-based tracking system. Automated the tracking of efficiency matrices, hardware rollback, prototyping, and review processes, used in ISO 9001 auditing.


Skills

Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, CloudFront, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, Fargate, OpenSearch), autoscaling, fleet management, cost optimization

Languages: Rust, Java, TypeScript, C#/.NET

Domains: Distributed systems, AI/ML productionization, high-throughput services, system design

Languages Spoken: English, Spanish


Patents

Method and system for rendering images in scenes (US 9,483,877)

Method and system for personalizing images rendered in scenes for personalized customer experience (US 9,786,079)


Education

Northeastern University, Boston

2000 to 2005 | B.S. Computer Science, Minor in Electrical Engineering

Completed one year of cooperative education across multiple companies. Served on the executive board of ACM and SHPE. Represented the university at the Microsoft Imagine Cup, earning 1st place regionally and 3rd nationally.


Awards

Microsoft Imagine Cup | 2005 National Winner 3rd Place, 2005 Regional Winner 1st Place, 2004 Regional Winner 1st Place

LaCLA Academic Scholar | Full academic scholarship, 2001 to 2005

Outstanding Computer Technology Student Award | Class of 2000

Skills USA-VICA | 1st Place Computer Networking, 2000