Coding

Highly distributed systems for healthcare — Azure, Kubernetes, and Java, in service of the CDC and HHS.

I build large-scale healthcare systems for Leidos, most recently for the CDC. NHSN, the system my work sits under, now serves more than 178,000 users across over 39,000 healthcare facilities nationwide. I wanted to be a doctor once; I ended up helping patients with code instead, and I've made peace with that trade. These days I spend as much time leading and teaching engineers as I do writing software, and it turns out I love that part most.

What I'm building now

A test and quality platform for the program's Java 21 Quarkus microservices, wired into GitHub Actions so nothing ships without passing through it.

  1. Smoke tests. The main path works: the standard mapping, the request, the response.
  2. Boundary tests. Edge cases and bad input — empty, missing, unknown, and malicious values.
  3. Integration tests. The whole app started up, with requests and messages run through it against stand-ins for the outside services.
  4. Core unit tests with a coverage gate. Core logic, built from Maven Central alone, has to reach 60% line and branch coverage across covid19api and CDA.
  5. Fixture validity tests. CDA's sample documents must pass the CDA schema and schematron, so fixtures can't drift out of spec.
  6. Static analysis. SpotBugs and PMD.
  7. Security scanning. Committed-credential detection plus a dependency vulnerability check.

  1. Principal DevOps and Automation Cloud Architect, Leidos

    September 2026 – present · CDC National Healthcare Safety Network

    • Building the automated test and quality platform covering more than 200 deployed services — Java 21 Quarkus microservices — with smoke, boundary, and full integration tests run against stand-ins for the outside services.
    • Set a coverage gate on core logic — 60% line and branch, built from Maven Central alone — across the covid19api and CDA services.
    • Validate CDA sample documents against schema and schematron, so fixtures can't quietly drift out of spec.
    • Wired static analysis (SpotBugs, PMD), committed-credential scanning, and dependency vulnerability checks into GitHub Actions pipelines.

  2. Principal DevOps Cloud Architect, Leidos

    March 2024 – September 2026 · CDC National Healthcare Safety Network

    • Led the migration of NHSN from on-premises infrastructure to Azure — Kubernetes (AKS), Azure SQL, Key Vault, and Service Bus.
    • Own the delivery platform behind the program: 180 CI/CD pipelines across Azure DevOps and GitHub spanning four environments, feeding more than 200 deployed services and over 50 Databricks notebooks.
    • Own DevSecOps across all of it — security scanning, secrets management, and environment promotion.

  3. Distributed Systems Cloud Architect, Leidos

    July 2021 – March 2024 · CDC National Healthcare Safety Network and IZ Gateway

    • Designed and built Java APIs that let hospitals, long-term care facilities, and other providers exchange data securely with CDC and HHS.
    • Built the ingestion side of NHSN's automated FHIR reporting, processing patient-level FHIR at terabyte scale to feed digital quality measures.
    • Deployed the IZ Gateway, which routes immunization records to state health departments, as Java microservices on AWS.

  4. Tech Lead and Cloud Architect, ASPR Ready — Leidos

    February 2021 – July 2021 · HHS ASPR

    • Led the team that designed and shipped ASPR Ready, which tracks the people and supplies supporting hurricane and tornado sites for HHS and FEMA — Java microservices and React on AWS GovCloud.

  5. Tech Lead and Cloud Architect, CareC2 — Leidos

    June 2017 – February 2021

    • Built a highly distributed ETL system on AWS that monitors surgery data from multiple healthcare providers to improve patient outcomes.
    • Managed multiple software teams as lead Java developer, tech lead, and cloud architect.
    • Built the ETL pipeline that shared Covid-19 data between the CDC and the states.

  6. Senior Software Engineer, Leidos

    August 2015 – June 2017

    • Developed the Leidos Data Exchange Framework for interoperability between disparate health systems — Kubernetes, Kafka, Docker, Spring Boot, and Camel on AWS.

  7. Software Engineer, Leidos

    March 2015 – August 2015

    • Built enterprise healthcare information exchange applications in Java and Groovy (Grails, Spring, Hibernate) with PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Cassandra.

  8. Systems Developer, Courier Express

    January 2012 – March 2015 · Marietta, GA

    • Wrote EDI parsers for ANSI X12 shipping documents and common file formats on a LAMP stack with PHP, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

Resume

Get in touch

Agents, editors, and fellow builders welcome. The fastest way to reach me is email.

hrdinkins@gmail.com LinkedIn