cory@coryellenberger:~$ whoami

Cory Ellenberger

Software Engineer

cory.ellen.ce@gmail.comLinkedIn


About

I'm a software engineer with ~20 years of experience, these days focused almost entirely on AI — building AI platforms and driving their adoption across engineering, DevOps, and SRE teams. I work daily across the model and harness landscape (Claude, GPT, and others; Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, Windsurf, and more), evaluating them, wiring them into real workflows, and figuring out what actually holds up in production versus what's just a demo.

Experience

Principal Software Engineer II — Engineering Lead, API / DevOps / Site Reliability Engineering

DirecTVEl Segundo, CA 2021 – Present (5 years)

  • Run the API Teams, DevOps Teams, and Site Reliability Engineering teams, setting technical direction and priorities across all three.
  • Building AI Platforms at DirecTV over the past year, adopted for use across IT.
  • Lead the startup of the SRE team, working with leadership to bring SRE practices to DirecTV.
  • Worked across UI/API teams to design a Canary solution that met all of their needs and issues.
  • Introduced Canary Deployments to UI and API microservices, including coupling canary releases across multiple microservices from UI to API to downstream endpoints.
  • Collaborated with Development, Business, and Marketing to define SLAs across products and features, used to inform Error Budgets, monitoring configurations, alerts, and thresholds.
  • Implemented Helm K8s templates and standardized Jenkins pipelines across all Next.js and Spring Boot microservices, speeding onboarding and adoption.
  • Drove CI/CD improvements: automated testing with Katalon, and AppliTools pre-prod snapshots for immediate production validation post-release.
  • Improved the Docker compilation process, reducing final image sizes from ~4GB to under 500MB in some cases.
  • Drove continuous improvements in budget monitoring and cost reduction across teams and infrastructure — from scaling configurations to log propagation — reducing costs month over month.
  • Led and participated in architectural discussions/redesigns of the Azure/AWS cloud platform covering performance, cost, bottlenecks, session management, and security policies.
  • Collaborated with Platform and Leadership to define and implement DR strategies based on cost.

Technical Architect / Lead Software Engineer (contracted to AT&T / DirecTV, all 13 years)

Cayuse Technologies Commercial ServicesPendleton, OR January 2009 – 2022

  • Development Lead/Architect for a sports streaming Acquisition and Self Care web applications.
  • Led the migration of SSO for all streaming and mobile services to a cloud framework, including a new authentication service.
  • Security Liaison for multiple applications/teams and SME for contracting groups on security resolution.
  • Migrated multiple applications to AWS and Azure, working with DevOps/Production Operations teams.
  • Performance contact for SSO and Acquisition; improved NodeJS and Play server performance by 75% through cache optimization, reducing hardware needs by more than half to support 100k+ purchase transactions per minute.
  • Delivered projects and features across multiple responsive web applications, from estimates through planning, execution, and delivery for an international technology company.
  • Used Agile, SAFe Agile, Kanban, SCRUM, Extreme Programming, Feature Driven Design, Domain Driven Design, and more.
  • Managed teams across shores made up of multiple vendor and employee resources.
  • Delivered 80+ projects and thousands of features, some with impossible timelines or delayed/overlapping dependencies requiring close cross-team, cross-shore collaboration.
  • Introduced and improved CI/CD practices for the Sales applications, onboarding full continuous delivery and automating a fully manual deployment process.
  • Onboarded full-stack unit and integration testing (Jasmine and Selenium/Protractor, JUnit with Mockito), improving code coverage from 0 to 50%+ on a 2M+ line Java/JavaScript application.
  • Onboarded multiple SAST and DAST tools during the company's standardization, improving visibility into code quality, technical debt, and security violations.
  • Worked across Java, JavaScript, Node.js, and .NET/C#, architecting and building microservices within the Sales framework that improved Product Qualification process times by ~30%.
  • Managed delivery for multiple Cayuse projects outside core telecom contracts in the Sales organization.
  • SME for Cayuse Delivery Management on technical job descriptions and interviews/screening, technology reviews, RFP reviews, and CMMI usage and metrics across Cayuse Delivery.

IT Help Desk

Oregon CapitalSalem, OR 2008 – 2009

  • IT help desk support for the House of Representatives and Senate during legislative sessions, including setup and post-session breakdown.

Developer

Cayuse TechnologiesPendleton, OR 2007 – 2008

  • Java bootcamp into building internal project management tools in Java.
  • Built and maintained the CMS for Cayuse using ClearCase/ClearQuest and taught the development team CMS practices.

White Papers

Placeholder — links to shared write-ups and white papers go here.