Brett Okken - Senior Director, Platform Engineering

Brett Okken

Senior Director, Platform Engineering

Kansas City, Missouri, United States

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Brett Okken is a seasoned engineering leader with 17 years of experience shaping data platforms and core services for large-scale EHR systems, currently leading Platform Engineering for Oracle’s Millennium EHR from Kansas City. He combines deep hands-on systems and backend expertise—having contributed performance and memory optimizations to widely used open-source projects like the PostgreSQL JDBC driver and snappy-java—with strategic leadership of globally distributed agile teams. Brett has driven cloud migrations, petabyte-scale PACS archives, and SaaS observability practices while championing DevOps and CI/CD for Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) solutions. Known for pragmatic architecture and a services-based approach, he bridges senior business, operations, and engineering stakeholders to deliver reliable, customer-focused platforms. An advocate for performance and efficient resource use, his open-source work shows a practical focus on transfer optimizations, UTF-8 encoding, and array/binary data handling that improves real-world throughput.

17 years of coding experience

20 years of employment as a software developer

Kansas City Christian Academy

Bachelor's Degree CIS Mathematics, Bachelor's Degree CIS Mathematics at Missouri State University

Stackoverflow

Stats

6,238reputation

835kreached

330answers

3questions

Badges

java

top-1%

tomcat

top-5%

multithreading

top-5%

Github Skills (20)

postgresql10

arrayobject10

jdbc10

java10

javas10

performance-optimization10

data-handling10

binary-data10

compress9

utf9

multithreading9

snappy9

tomcat9

compression9

collections6

Programming languages (3)

JavaShellGo

Github contributions (5)

xerial/snappy-java

Apr 2013 - Jan 2021

Snappy compressor/decompressor for Java

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:1 review, 11 commits, 6 PRs in 7 years 10 months

Contributions summary:Brett primarily contributed to optimizing the `SnappyFramedOutputStream` for NIO, improving performance. They added methods like `transferFrom` and `transferTo` to allow for transfer optimizations, particularly for streaming data. Additionally, the user aggressively reclaimed direct byte buffers to reduce memory overhead and improved the reading of the stream. These changes suggest a focus on improving the efficiency of the library, especially regarding data transfer and memory management.

java

pgjdbc/pgjdbc

Dec 2017 - Jan 2023

Postgresql JDBC Driver

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:154 reviews, 21 commits, 44 PRs in 5 years 1 month

Contributions summary:Brett made several contributions focused on enhancing the PostgreSQL JDBC driver. These enhancements included adding support for primitive array types and implementing read-only transactions with configurable behavior. Additionally, they worked on optimizing UTF-8 encoding and improving the binary representation of numeric and array data types to enhance performance. Furthermore, the user contributed to refactoring array decoding mechanisms.

driverjdbcpostgresqljava

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