Steven Hicks
Lead Software Engineer at Commerce
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteven Hicks is a Principal-level software engineer and architect with 13+ years building resilient, cost-efficient distributed systems across healthcare, mapping, and data platforms. Currently on Oracle's consulting staff after leading critical initiatives at Optum, he has repeatedly translated complex business requirements into pragmatic architectures that cut costs (e.g., reducing infrastructure spend from $50k+/year to $8) and shrink operational burden (Priority 1 incidents down from 26 to 2). He specializes in Scala, functional patterns, Kafka, Kubernetes, and serverless tooling, and has a track record of fast, reliable service delivery—building a GraphQL service in two months that reduced client integration time from months to days. Steven is also a hands-on mentor who drives engineering culture change through RCA practices, architectural decision records, and cross-team knowledge sharing. Notably, his work has prevented major HIPAA risk by deploying Mapbox securely in Kubernetes and uncovered memory leaks that yielded dramatic runtime savings. Based in Chicago, he combines deep technical troubleshooting with strategic system design to deliver measurable business impact.
13 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Masters Computer Science, Masters Computer Science at University of North Carolina at CharlotteOrange High SchoolBachelors of Science Computer Science, Bachelors of Science Computer Science at Elon University
English, German
Stackoverflow
14,194reputation
2.0mreached
305answers
134questions
Github Skills (200)
jaeger10
client-library10
static-site-generator10
apm10
application-monitoring10
frontend10
opentelemetry10
rest-api10
github-pages10
responsive10
pycharm10
kafka10
tailwindcss10
fizzbuzz10
signoz10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
monksy/PageRecommender
Aug 2016 - Jun 2025
This project is designed to make recommendations to pages, based on user sessions and visits from apache web logs.
Contributions:1 PR, 4 pushes in 8 years 11 months
weblog
monksy/awesome-kafka
Dec 2018 - Apr 2026
A collection of kafka-resources
Contributions:5 reviews, 23 PRs, 25 pushes in 7 years 4 months
kafkakafka-streams
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