Michael Bazos

• • Manage a diverse team of engineers including backend, frontend, native app, and test engineers
• • Actively participate in Priceline's co-op program, training and managing co-op students alongside other direct reports

Relevant Technologies: Atlassian Suite, DX, New Relic, Splunk, ClickHouse

• • Manage a team of engineers responsible for the core rental car APIs, from search to booking, supporting both Priceline.com and a large affiliate network.
• • Partner with business and product leadership to define technical strategy and set priorities to drive business growth
• • Champion adoption of AI-powered development tools across the team, encouraging use of LLM coding assistants including Gemini CLI, Cody, and Cursor to accelerate development velocity
• • Organized and led internal AI hackathon for the rental car team to explore various LLMs, resulting in customer-focused projects for counter reviews and rental car supplier policy text analysis
• • Guide the architecture and development of internal tools to improve business operations
• • Lead the design of scalable systems for onboarding new rental car suppliers.
• • Encouraged and assisted the team with the introduction of machine learning to optimize rental car search result rankings
• • Direct the implementation of new caching strategies for supplier data to enhance system performance and search speed

Relevant Technologies: Docker, Kubernetes, Java, Node.js, Kafka, Oracle DB, MySql, Redis, Cassandra, Google Cloud Platform, Gemini CLI, Cody, Cursor, Jellyfish, Atlassian Suite, Workday, Splunk, New Relic

• • Lead company efforts moving application workloads from on-premises to cloud
• • Lead Java engineers, adapting shared infrastructure Java libraries and developed patterns to allow for lift and shift of complex applications
• • Trained 15+ teams on how to move applications to the cloud including languages from Java, JS, PHP & Go
• • Remain a core contributor to the Rental Car product team

Relevant Technologies: Helm Charts, Docker, Kubernetes, Java, Node.js, Kafka, Oracle DB, MySql, Redis, Cassandra, Google Cloud Platform

• • Leadership role on the Rental Car team as an individual contributor
• • Lead efforts in consolidating redundant APIs, onboarding new supplier systems, onboarding new affiliates, and internationalizing the rental car path on Priceline.com
• • Worked closely with the rental car frontend team to help them migrate from a legacy frontend to a more modern one using Node.js + AngularJS
• • Work closely with the rental car business, product and tech team to help prioritize work to drive the rental car business and product forward

Relevant Technologies: REST, JSON, Java, Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Tomcat, Oracle DB, MySql DB, Cassandra, Lucene, XML, Node.js, AngularJS

• • Modernized and built the foundational APIs for the rental car services
• • Worked on several high volume APIs with high RPS
• • Worked on all aspects of the rental car technology stack including APIs from search to booking and internal tools leveraged by our business team
• • Focused on projects having direct impact on the growth of the rental car business consistently hitting 20%+ growth quarter after quarter
• • Lead efforts to remove legacy EJB infrastructure
• • Improved unit test & integration testing and streamlined our build processes using Jenkins
• • Built and implemented in-memory database caching resulting in 25%+ reduction in API response times from our search APIs
• • Won Priceline's first hackathon building a radical new UI for searching for rental cars one-way trips using a dual map display

Relevant Technologies: REST, JSON, Java, Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Tomcat, Oracle DB, MySql DB, Cassandra, Lucene, XML

• • Designed and implemented Java enterprise components used across the organization by other developers
• • Built from scratch Cigna's first native application for Android also working on the backend written in Python (Django) to help with native app concerns and act as an orchestration tier for integrating legacy SOAP API's with more modern HTTP + JSON API's

Relevant Technologies: Android, Python, REST, JSON, Django, Java, J2EE, Spring Framework, Spring Integration, Spring WS, IBM Websphere, XMLBeans, XSLT, Schema, WSDL, DB2, Oracle DB, CICS transactions, ESB

• • Major contributor to Cigna's first major push into web services powering many aspects of the business including Cigna's call center, website and more
• • Designed, implemented web services supporting the member domain for Cigna's web services
• • Implemented changes to lower overall response times saving MIPS utilization by 70% and received a company award for this work

Relevant Technologies: Java, J2EE, Spring Framework, ODSI, IBM Websphere, BEA Weblogic, XMLBeans, XQuery, XSLT, SOA, SOAP, Schema, WSDL, DB2, Oracle DB, MS SQL, CICS transactions

• • Responsible for Cigna's authorization, authentication and login flows for system access across Cigna including membership on the website
• • Worked on enhancements, production fixes towards Cigna's SSO services

Relevant Technologies: Java, J2EE, JSP, DB2 UDB, CICS transactions, LDAP, XML HTTP Services, Apache Struts, Cigna Java Framework, Hibernate ORM, Spring Framework, XMLBeans, IBM Websphere, Unix LDAP