Joe Burzinski

Staff Software Engineer

burzin.ski

Profile

Staff software engineer with 11 years building safety-critical distributed systems in C++ and Java.

Works across domain logic, messaging, persistence, and recovery, and develops data-access, reliability, build, and diagnostic infrastructure. Sets technical direction and directly implements complex functionality.

Experience

Wabtec Corporation

Senior Application Architect

  • Own the Authorities dispatch service end to end: safety-critical workflows for train movements, on-track work, and operating exceptions. Direct its domain model and architecture, implement its rules and state machines, divide and review work, and gate release readiness.
  • Lead the Authorities performance effort, cutting p95 response times across endpoints from over 1 second to 280–350 ms by reducing CockroachDB load and round trips.
  • Serve as a cross-team subject-matter expert on railway operations, translating operational intent into requirements and testable behavior, identifying cross-service defects, and collaborating with maintainers to drive corrections.
  • Built a restart-safe track-network upgrade control plane across multiple dispatch services, comprising a persisted state machine, idempotent commands, and auditable recovery. Implemented the synchronization contract inside one partner service myself when staffing ran short.

Union Pacific Railroad

Systems Engineer, promoted five times from Application Developer

  • Carried safety-critical features end to end: domain and service logic, messaging, Oracle persistence, Qt user interfaces, build, and deployment. Served as a cross-team escalation point for production incidents and complex defects.
  • Built CADX’s sole typed C++/Oracle layer, sustaining 6 μs amortized per row in batched operations.
  • Pioneered sanitizer and hardening infrastructure across two C++ codebases, exposing hundreds of defects, eliminating recurring crash signatures, and extending stable runs from hours to days or weeks.
  • Co-led CADX-side integration of a third-party movement planner through domain-model translation, distributed recovery, and deployment, delivering live decision support and dispatcher-supervised automation of selected actions.
  • Owned the CMake, Conan, and Python build platform and Jenkins CI for a multi-million-line C++ control system, holding build and test feedback steady as quality gates and test volume grew.

Selected work

Conservative safety redesign (Wabtec)

Identified a safety-critical mismatch between user-facing protections and operational state, then reduced the feature to a conservative boundary the system could guarantee, and verified the result through integrated system testing.

Native failure analysis (Union Pacific)

Built centralized crash notification and retrieval across hundreds of servers, then automated matching of crashes to exact build artifacts and source revisions, cutting crash discovery and analysis setup from days to minutes.

Testing transformation (Union Pacific)

Introduced Catch2 and grew automated unit and module tests from zero to several thousand across a legacy control system.

Train-schedule startup (Union Pacific)

Independently redesigned the C++ post-processing behind bulk train-schedule loading, cutting that startup stage from hours to under a second at production scale.

Engineering education (Union Pacific and Wabtec)

Mentored 10+ Union Pacific engineers to independent delivery and created training on modern C++, testing, profiling, debugging, builds, and domain modeling. Explained the Authorities architecture and its role in railroad operations to 50 engineers at Wabtec.

Skills

Systems
Modern C++, Java 21, Quarkus, Python, shared libraries, microservices, high availability, concurrency, state machines, performance
Messaging
Protocol Buffers, gRPC, Kafka, ActiveMQ, Avro, JSON Schema, REST, OpenAPI, event-driven systems
Data Persistence
Oracle, CockroachDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite3, transactions
Reliability & Quality
Sanitizers, native debugging, fuzz testing, Catch2, JUnit, Testcontainers, static analysis, logging
Build & Delivery
CMake, Conan, Maven, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger
AI tooling
Agentic coding harnesses, MCP policy, agent rules, automated quality gates

Credentials

Missouri University of Science and Technology

Two Bachelor of Science degrees: Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, both magna cum laude, 2015.

Accepted upstream contributions

Authored spdlog’s compile-time validation of fmt format strings; patches in LLVM and Catch2.

Wabtec AI Champion

Designated for the Network Optimization group; uses agentic tooling daily on production work and coaches policy-compliant adoption.