About me

Engineer, author, inventor — building secure systems at scale for over two decades.

I’m a Distinguished Engineer at Wells Fargo, where over more than two decades I’ve designed corporate technology architectures, database systems, and the secure web platform serving more than twenty million customers across desktop, mobile, and hybrid applications. My work there has spanned the technical integration of the Wachovia merger, the launch of the ClearXchange P2P payments network (the forerunner of Zelle), ACH bill presentment with NACHA, an early small-business check RDC platform, stronger authentication controls built to FFIEC guidance, and the migration of several hundred Java applications to a Cloud Foundry PaaS.

Two books I co-authored, Reactive Design Patterns (2017) and Reactive Application Development (2018), cover the patterns and the practical Scala and Akka techniques for building resilient, elastic, message-driven distributed systems. I’ve also served as a reviewer or technical development editor on titles spanning MongoDB, legacy software re-engineering, deep learning with PyTorch, and quantum software development in Python, helping authors sharpen the technical material before it reaches readers.

My nine issued U.S. patents sit at the intersection of security, identity, and customer experience. They cover credentialing trusted applications in cloud environments; monitoring sessions, scoring per-user security, and applying adaptive friction; granting designees access to financial accounts after an adverse event detected from a user device; enriching advertisement click-throughs with consumer data; and a location-tracking design that separates encrypted location data from the keys needed to read it.

Earlier I was President of InterScales, building the content management and Akamai-integrated deployment system behind wellsfargo.com; a Technical Manager at Oracle in the Interactive Television Solutions group, where I also consulted on the Oracle8 alpha rollout and on large telecom data warehouses; and a Computer Scientist at Advanced Decision Systems (acquired by Booz, Allen & Hamilton in 1992), where I led the team building an AI-based mission planner used for live U.S. Air Force combat missions. I started out at Kaiser Electronics prototyping flight-tested helmet-mounted display systems for fighter aircraft. I hold a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where I also played in the UC Jazz Ensembles.

Get in touch: hello@sl.hanafee.net · LinkedIn.