/ About
Software engineer with an M.S. in Software Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University Chicago. Currently working on a high-performing enterprise platform team building authentication and API gateway infrastructure at scale. I enjoy building clean, practical software and have experience across front-end, back-end, data engineering, and machine learning.
Currently, core contributor on the API Gateway Platform, and owner and subject-matter expert for its Authorization Server — the enterprise OAuth 2.0 implementation handling workforce and consumer authorization flows.
The platform is the front door every internal and external API call at the bank flows through, carrying 10B+ requests and 150TB+ of data a day across 100k+ clients, peaking at 200k req/sec and reliably up 99.99% of the time. The Authorization Server issues and revokes every OAuth token behind it: 2B+ a day, at a 25k/sec production peak.
Active ownership keeps this security-critical system covered and spreads the institutional knowledge that keeps it resilient, reinforced by peer recognition on several high-stakes partner releases.
When I'm not writing code, you can find me in the boxing ring 🥊, on the mountain snowboarding, enjoying a live concert, or at home building furniture and making art. World traveler. Eagle Scout. Cat dad to Sunny.
Four original paintings by Sean Higgins — a colorful floral field, two warm abstract pieces in orange and red, and a dark abstract night-sky piece — are shown alongside this text.
Sean is a highly trusted engineer on the team. He is one of our most knowledgable experts on Identity in the Gateway. He is curious and dives deep into problems to understand them completely, and is capable of sharing that knowledge out.
/ Experience
Work
Senior Software Engineer
- OAuth 2.0 subject-matter expert for the API Gateway Platform — architected and shipped Workforce SSO, Step-Up Authentication, and a custom Identity Provider integration for consumer sign-in, all compliant with the OAuth 2.0 spec for enterprise-wide API security.
- Own the Consent UI, a full-stack Angular app on AWS CloudFront powering customer consent experiences for third-party data sharing — leading feature development and welcoming inner-source contributions from partner teams.
- Core maintainer of the largely Lua-based API Gateway, delivering feature work, AWS DevOps improvements, and the technical leadership behind initiatives like the UK gateway migration and CFPB Open Banking compliance.
- Mentored entry-level associate engineers through a 10-week program across two projects: modernizing a legacy application into a well-managed AWS Batch (Python) job for data extraction and data-lake publication, and building a circuit breaker for a shared Redis connector library.
- Organized and led an AI Hackathon on Capital One's internal AI Sandbox — running tool tutorials for entrants, guiding a project team to completion, and authoring a blog post on the outcomes and learnings.
Data Engineer
- Built a full-stack Angular and Java application that automated the creation and execution of Scala ETL workflows for credit-card partner conversions, cutting average conversion time by four months.
- Transformed 10M+ trailing transactions across 1–2M customer accounts through three successful partner conversions, running custom Scala ETL as daily batch jobs on AWS EMR.
Data Scientist
- Designed a scalable ML training pipeline — ETL, training, testing, and evaluation — and migrated it from a single remote Windows server to AzureML GPU clusters, doubling training speed and enabling 4×+ more experiments.
- Researched and trained classification models that predicted hospital and physician claim traits ahead of insurance review, saving an estimated $1–2M per year by accelerating claim processing and eliminating avoidable costs.
Data Engineer
- Full-stack developer on a Micro-Automation Portal that let employees manage automations — like the CFO report and accounting journals — for quick analysis and visualization, built with Angular, Python ETL, and AWS DynamoDB.
Education
M.S. Software Engineering
- GPA 3.7/4.0.
- Teaching Assistant for Database Programming, Intermediate Object-Oriented Programming, Machine Learning, and Operating Systems.
- Research Assistant — developed novel NLP techniques to classify drug misuse from patients' electronic health records using convolutional neural networks.
B.S. Computer Science
- Cumulative GPA 3.6/4.0 · Major GPA 3.8/4.0.
- Research Assistant — built two NLP applications: automated keyphrase extraction from a small text corpus, and GitHub issue classification with neural networks.
I want to take a minute and really appreciate all you have done in building and testing the MCP Gateway. There are a lot of unknowns, shifting priorities, and new last minute features. However, you have been great partners in helping build and test these capabilities.
Sean led the successful effort in transitioning our Machine Learning pipelines onto Microsoft AzureML in a larger intent to modernize Data Science at the company. He also developed and implemented many DNN Tensorflow models to solve huge cardinality problems in healthcare space. Sean showed the qualities of a young and curious engineer... He is a true asset both as a technical resource and thought leader.
/ Highlights
Full-lifecycle ownership
Takes projects from incident response through design, mentorship, implementation, testing, production rollout, documentation, and stakeholder communication — not just the code.
Force multiplier through AI adoption
Requested early access to Claude Code and fundamentally transformed personal workflow. Leads weekly AI Lunch & Learns and organized a hackathon built around an AI coding-agent challenge.
Turns incidents into platform improvements
Converted a Sev3 action item into a resilient circuit breaker pattern for the shared library, then mentored the team through adopting it.
Breadth of concurrent ownership
Simultaneously owns multiple critical services for the platform, spanning Python, Lua, and Angular, along with their surrounding infrastructure.
Cost-conscious engineering leadership
Leading a deployment projected to save $100k+ annually in Transit Gateway charges — initiative beyond feature delivery.
Conference-to-action pipeline
Attended the MCP Dev Summit in NYC, focusing on sessions at the crossroads of MCP and OAuth — including emerging patterns like AI agents as OAuth clients.
Proactive knowledge sharing
Reduces key-person risk through training presentations, comprehensive documentation, knowledge-transfer sessions, AI Lunch & Learns, and CODA DOJO mentorship.
Sean - thank you for the investment in the developer community via CODA!
/ Contact
Let's build something.
Have a question or want to work together? Send me a message or reach out through any of the links below.
It is fair to say that it is highly unlikely we would have been able to have achieved such tight milestones without your support. You are a brilliant engineer and the only thing I wish had been different is that we could have worked together at least once in person.
