Al Bunch

Al Bunch

Staff Engineer | AWS | Symfony | 20+ Years in SaaS

Versatile Staff Engineer with 20+ years of experience building scalable SaaS platforms and leading distributed engineering teams. Expert in AWS-native architectures, Symfony ecosystems, and containerized deployments. Proven ability to reduce cloud costs, modernize legacy systems, and lead migrations with zero downtime.

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

Experience

Senior Engineer – FormAssembly

2023 -- Present

  • Led tiger team that cut CI/CD build times from 60+ minutes to under 21 minutes, delivering a significant engineering velocity increase across the organization
  • Built client migration tooling handling 3–4 migrations per week, reducing delivery time from days to under one hour while freeing infrastructure team capacity
  • Architected fault-tolerant analytics pipeline (API Gateway, SQS, NiFi, OpenSearch) — eliminated data loss from prior OpenTelemetry architecture and recovered 6 days of queued events during an unplanned outage with zero data loss
  • Enhanced internal MCP server with custom tool development and Redis session management, enabling automated form testing and AI-powered workflow automation
PHP 8 Symfony AWS Redis MCP Servers Docker SQS OpenSearch Apache NiFi

Staff Engineer / Team Lead – Experian

2020 -- 2023

  • Led a team of 5 developers and 1 QA through Agile sprints and Kanban workflows, providing mentorship, pair coding, and proactive blocker removal
  • Drove multiple zero-downtime Symfony framework migrations (3.4 → 4.4 → 5.4) with PHP 8 compatibility updates across the full application stack
  • Containerized legacy Symfony application and built AWS Lambda functions, eliminating deployment bottlenecks and accelerating release cycles
  • Established engineering standards for pull requests, code style, PSR compliance, and unit testing, improving code quality and team consistency
PHP 8 Symfony AWS Lambda Docker CI/CD MySQL Team Leadership

Founder / Lead Engineer – AcuCoders

2019 -- Present

  • Lead a cross-functional team of 6–8 (engineering, QA, design, PM, marketing) delivering custom software and automation solutions for small business clients. Manage hiring, team composition, and project delivery.
  • Architected and launched TC Track, a multi-tenant real estate transaction management platform (Symfony 7, React 19, AWS ECS, Stripe billing)
  • Built AI-powered form spam detection pipeline processing 1,000+ submissions with multi-layer filtering (ASN/IP blocking, heuristics, LLM analysis) at $5.27 total AI cost
  • Developed natural language query system translating plain English to SQL with automatic data visualization, featuring a novel #[AiSafe] attribute pattern for secure AI data exposure
  • Designed field service management platform for lawn care businesses with GPS time tracking, geocoded client management, and mobile-first UX
  • Designed and operate AWS infrastructure across all projects — two deliberate architecture patterns (ECS/Aurora production SaaS and composable EC2/Docker for SMBs) with OIDC federation, Terraform IaC, and cost-conscious operational practices
Symfony React TypeScript AWS ECS Docker PostgreSQL Stripe OpenAI Anthropic Playwright

Full Stack Developer / Team Lead – Eligibility Tracking Calculators

2017 -- 2020

  • Migrated on-prem application to a three-tier AWS solution (EC2, Multi-AZ RDS, S3, Lambda), eliminating 4+ hours of monthly downtime and achieving zero-downtime releases through revised deployment strategy
  • Implemented a CI/CD pipeline for the development environment using Jenkins/Gitlab, automating the build and QA process
  • Decoupled client payroll processing using SQS, EC2 worker instances, and MongoDB, reducing processing time from hours to minutes during peak demand
  • Achieved over 50% reduction in AWS expenditure by right-sizing infrastructure and consolidating to RDS with read replicas for reporting
  • Introduced automated functional testing and rollback/alert mechanisms during dev and UAT deployments
AWS EC2 RDS S3 Lambda SQS MongoDB Jenkins MySQL

PM / Lead Developer – Sonic Group

2016 -- 2017

  • Led the development of custom software solutions for the real estate industry, with a focus on architecting a CRM platform tailored to real estate wholesaling
  • Integrated CRM with local MLS database, address verification database, and an answering service, streamlining lead management processes
  • Implemented a feature to generate daily call lists for follow-up with leads, as well as on-demand and periodic reports for management to track agent call activity
  • Developed an automated marketing software that effectively retrieved data from regional appraisal districts, allowing for personalized mailouts based on client criteria
PHP MySQL CRM API Integration

Lead Developer – British Petroleum

2006 -- 2016

  • Spearheaded the development of a cutting-edge, automated Linux application deployment system on a global scale, effectively distributing Linux petrotechnical applications to 21 remote sites while adhering to business rules and negotiated license agreements
  • Orchestrated version releases across all 21 global sites, collaborating closely with site teams to ensure minimal interface downtime and seamless integration
  • Engaged directly with the user community to gather and enhance feature requests, ensuring the system met users’ evolving needs
  • Employed expert-level database skills to normalize and optimize existing MySQL databases, successfully eliminating bottlenecks and enhancing system performance
Linux MySQL Bash Python Global Deployment

Sr. Web Application Developer – Compaq / Hewlett Packard

1999 -- 2006

  • Led project team migrating and integrating 11 web-based applications onto centralized platform for engineering test departments
  • Implemented automated server builds and test deployments using Linux, kickstart, and PXE boot, enabling test engineers to focus on higher-value testing
Linux PXE Boot Kickstart Perl

Skills

AWS Services
EC2 ECS Fargate RDS Aurora Serverless EBS EFS S3 Glacier SES SQS SNS ECR Route53 Lambda ALB API Gateway EventBridge DynamoDB CloudWatch Cost Optimization
Languages
PHP 7/8 JavaScript Python TypeScript Bash Perl HTML CSS KSH
Frameworks
Symfony 3/4/5/6 Doctrine ORM Laravel CakePHP CodeIgniter React Vue jQuery Bootstrap Tailwind REST APIs Microservices
AI / ML
OpenAI API Anthropic API Claude Code LLM Integration Ollama MCP Servers Function Calling Prompt Engineering
Databases
MariaDB MySQL Postgres MongoDB DynamoDB OpenSearch Elasticsearch
DevOps
Docker Docker Compose Jenkins GitHub Actions Terraform Ansible Apache NiFi Nginx Apache ELK Splunk Nagios Heroku Redis git GitHub Gitlab
Methodologies
Agile Scrum Kanban CI/CD TDD Code Review Sprint Planning Retrospectives
Testing
PHPUnit Selenium Functional Testing Integration Testing UAT
Monitoring
New Relic CloudWatch Pushover ELK Stack Custom Alerting
Leadership
Team Management Hiring Mentorship Cross-functional Collaboration Sprint Ceremonies
Platforms
AWS Digital Ocean Linode Vultr Linux (Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, SUSE) Mac Windows
Other
WordPress Drupal Joomla Wix Twilio 3cx FreePBX/Asterisk Postman Confluence Jira Composer npm OAuth JWT Webhook Integrations Data Pipelines ETL