James Knesel
About James Knesel
James Knesel is a Sr Cloud Engineer at Change Healthcare with extensive experience in cloud engineering, software development, and IT leadership roles.
Current Role at Change Healthcare
James Knesel is currently a Senior Cloud Engineer at Change Healthcare, based in Alpharetta, Georgia. He has held this role since 2018. In this capacity, he has been instrumental in leading cloud migration projects, including the migration of legacy ETL jobs to AWS cloud and developing a cloud-native rewrite of an MSSQL legacy data matching application using AWS EMR with Pyspark.
Previous Positions and Experience
Before joining Change Healthcare, James worked at Aritex IT as Principal Cloud Consultant and CIO in Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida Area in 2018. Prior to that, he was a Sr. iOS Developer at AutoLoop in Clearwater, FL, from 2016 to 2018. He also co-founded readyInnovations, where he served as CTO from 2014 to 2016 in Alpharetta, GA. Earlier in his career, he held various engineering and development roles at McKesson Provider Technologies, Elastic Networks, BellSouth, S2 Systems, and Electronic TeleCommunications, Inc.
Education and Academic Background
James Knesel holds a Master’s degree in Cybersecurity in Information Assurance from the University of South Florida, which he completed in 2018. Prior to that, he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1990. His formal education has equipped him with the foundational knowledge and advanced skills essential for his roles in cloud engineering and software development.
Notable Projects and Contributions
Throughout his career, James has led several high-impact projects. At Change Healthcare, he spearheaded the migration of legacy ETL jobs to AWS, transforming SQL Server DB schema to AWS Aurora Postgres and SSIS ETL packages to AWS Glue jobs. He developed a cloud-native rewrite of a legacy data matching application on AWS EMR with Pyspark. Additionally, he implemented an event-based architecture using AWS Eventbridge, SQS, Lambda, Glue, and EMR orchestrated by Apache Airflow for a data processing application.
Technical Expertise and Skills
James Knesel has a robust technical skill set, particularly in cloud technologies and data processing. His expertise includes AWS services like Lambda, SQS, Glue, EMR, and Eventbridge. He has also been involved in developing serverless architectures for real-time and batch processing applications. His experience spans various roles from software development to cloud engineering and architecting data migration solutions.