Genworth Canada
Developer (Data Search & Optimization)
July 2014 to January 2015 · Oakville, ON, Canada
Genworth Canada is the leading private sector supplier of mortgage default insurance in Canada.
Highlights
- Designed an intelligent matching system to detect names and addresses referring to the same entity, even with different spellings.
- Led company-wide Lunch & Learn sessions on Elasticsearch, raising technical literacy and promoting sustainable in-house expertise.
- Identified redundancies that eliminated the need for a third-party vendor, saving significant annual costs.
- Recognized internally as the go-to resource for Elasticsearch optimization and search performance.
About the Project
Genworth Canada was leading a North American initiative to move their application system to Elasticsearch. The goal of this new system: make it easier for Genworth to detect “red-flag” indicators of fraud from customer applications.
Finding Duplicates
I was hired based on my previous experience with Elasticsearch, but finding ways of removing dependencies on vendor services was not something I was expected to do. It was only after I got involved in the project and learned about their use case that I saw an opportunity to suggest a better way of doing things.
Using several state-of-the-art features of Elasticsearch, I was able to prototype a solution that effectively replaced a dependency on one of their key data analytics vendors, saving Genworth 10”s of thousands of dollars annually!
Recognition
Simon has been critical in helping the team in adding technologies like Node.js, Elasticsearch, and ExtJS to the Path technology stack building on his past experiences.