John Carnell Contact

Senior Engineering Leader

John Carnell

Building, modernizing, and operating large-scale software platforms.

I lead Genesys Media Control Services and help organizations deliver complex, distributed systems that make a real impact.

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Summary

About me →

Senior engineering leader with three decades of building, modernizing, and operating large-scale software platforms. I lead Genesys Media Control Services, about 50 people across seven teams, and I am accountable for the architecture and delivery of a multi-year modernization of monolithic, single-tenant telephony infrastructure: tens of thousands of servers moving into a microservice, built by the Call Session Service team, across 15 Amazon Web Services regions.

Alongside that platform work, I am helping lead Genesys’s AI transformation. I sponsored a pilot, and participated in getting it off the ground, in which a team is rewriting more than a million lines of C++ telephony code in Rust through an agentic development loop. I am also the product owner and champion for an agentic factory in the group: a loop that carries work from inception through design, planning, Jira tickets, and code generation, collecting data at each stage so projects can be delivered faster than by a purely human-driven team.

The through-line of the career is technical leadership at increasing scope: hands-on architecture, then engineering management, then direction of organizations that own critical production platforms.

Books

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Spring
Microservices
in Action

Spring Microservices in Action

John Carnell · Manning, 2017

Build and deploy production-ready microservices with Spring and Spring Boot.

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Spring
Microservices
in ActionSecond Edition

Spring Microservices in Action, Second Edition

John Carnell, co-author · Manning, 2021

Updated for modern Spring, cloud-native architectures, and production practices.

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Pro
Apache Struts
with AjaxJohn Carnell

Pro Apache Struts with Ajax

John Carnell · Apress, 2006

Build modern, rich web applications with Struts and Ajax.

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All books and publications

Talks

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Earlier talks
  • 2016 · Triangle Clojure Users Group
  • 2014 · MuleSoft Connect, Chicago
  • 2000–2012 · Java user groups and professional IT groups
  • 2008 · Fox Valley Operational Excellence Group, Appleton
  • 2008 · Agile IT!, Washington, D.C.
  • 2008 · Groovy/Grails Experience, Washington, D.C.
  • 2007, 2002 · Great Lakes Software Symposium, Chicago
  • 2003 · Pacific Northwest Software Symposium, Seattle
  • 2002–2003 · Ohio, Wisconsin, Atlanta, and Lonestar Java Software Symposiums
  • 1998 · Internet Expo, San Jose
  • 1998 · Data Warehousing Institute, San Diego

Background

Career journey →
  1. GenesysSenior Director, Media Control Services · Cary, NC · 2026 – Present

    Lead about 50 engineers delivering the telephony modernization and AI transformation.

  2. Technology LeadershipGenesys, Thrivent Financial, Schneider National · 1995 – 2026

    Three decades of building and operating enterprise software platforms across industries.

  3. EducationMBA, University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh (2009) · BA, Marquette University (1995)

    Criminology and Computer Science; Beta Gamma Sigma.

Let’s Connect

I’m always interested in connecting with technologists, leaders, and builders.

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Work

– PresentCary, North Carolina

Senior Director, Media Control Services

Genesys

Lead the Media Control Services organization, about 50 engineers, with accountability for technical direction, architecture, and delivery in the media-control domain.

Own the modernization of a monolithic, single-tenant telephony infrastructure. The program moves tens of thousands of those servers into a microservice built by the Call Session Service team and run across 15 AWS regions.

Took the migration over when it was significantly behind schedule. Re-prioritized the key architecture work, and the program is now migrating telephony servers onto that microservice infrastructure.

Help lead Genesys’s AI transformation. Sponsored a pilot to move more than a million lines of C++ telephony code to Rust with an agentic development loop, and participated in getting that pilot off the ground.

Product owner and champion for an agentic factory in the group. The factory is a full loop from inception through design, planning, Jira tickets, and code generation, with data collected at each stage, so the organization can deliver projects faster and more efficiently than a purely human-driven team.

– January 2026Raleigh, North Carolina

Director of Developer Engagement, Software Architect

Genesys

Directed four teams and 24 developers across operational support, the developer portal, developer evangelism, developer tooling, and disaster recovery.

Acted as the developer champion for AI products and tools across the internal and external Genesys developer community, including MCP tooling and developer experience with Amazon Q, Cursor, and Kiro.

Owned design and development of the Genesys Cloud Developer Center, and the Cloud developer tool chain in Java, Node.js, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, and Terraform.

Spoke, wrote, and evangelized the Genesys Cloud telephony and contact-center platform.

– July 2020Raleigh–Durham

Team Lead, Lead Software Engineer

Genesys · Edge Infrastructure Services

Led a virtual team of 13 engineers in three locations. Accountable for 17 microservices and about 4,700 telephony servers.

Designed the microservice architecture, in Go, Python, Java, Kotlin, Clojure, and Spring Boot, that connected the core telephony platform to cloud services on AWS.

Built and delivered a Clojure microservice that creates and upgrades more than 3,000 AWS telephony servers across 9 AWS regions.

This role is the direct predecessor of the current modernization: regional telephony infrastructure, then a 15-region replacement of that estate by the Call Session Service microservice.

– May 2015

Senior IT Architect, Enterprise Architecture

Thrivent Financial

Lead architect in the integration and services architecture practice and a member of the core architecture and design team. Member of the Critical Situation and Security Incident Response teams.

Program architect for the Workday HCM integration with Thrivent core systems. Integration architect for the iPipeline iGo e-application SaaS platform.

Authored the enterprise integration-patterns repository: more than 20 reference architectures for message- and SOA-based integration.

Led a 6-person team that replaced a 15-year PowerBuilder CRM, used by roughly 2,000 of 5,000 staff, with a web application on JSF, Tomcat, Mule, and Spring.

Led an 8-person team replacing core IVR and natural-language routing. Led a 13-person team through a WebSphere 7 upgrade covering 165-plus applications.

Redesigned the development framework and introduced a streamlined build and code-quality process that removed duplicated complexity.

– April 2012

Senior Manager, Integration Technologies Engineering

Thrivent Financial

Led a 23-person department for web infrastructure, call-center systems, and integration technologies. Managed a budget of more than $5 million across hardware, software, and staff.

Owned selection and support of the Java platform, including Spring and Hibernate, and replaced legacy source control and build management.

Accountable for license management and contract negotiation across the team’s software portfolio. A multi-year continuous-improvement effort removed about $500,000 in unused licenses.

– May 2008

Portfolio Architect, Member and Product Systems

Thrivent Financial

Blueprinted and roadmapped the Member and Product Systems application portfolio. Partnered with the business on requirements, estimates, and staffing.

Led a year-long Lean engagement on Java build and deploy. Delivered $281,000 in savings and earned a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt.

– 2007

Leader, Member Technical Services

Schneider National

Application architect and technical project manager for the Capacity Availability program, an 18,000-hour redesign of the legacy transportation management system. Led 14 developers. Served on the Agile adoption board and delivered with Scrum.

Application architect and technical project manager for Trailer Tracking. Led a 30-person Java and COBOL team in the US and India through a 130,000-hour, two-year integration of messages from a fleet of more than 40,000 trailers. The platform ingested about 4 million records a week at 10–12 records per second and avoided an estimated $20 million in new trailer assets.

Introduced test-driven development, automated builds, unit testing, and code coverage. Established a research-grant path so teams could work on new technology.

Also project-managed a freight payment system for the Netherlands office, working with US, Dutch, and German teams.

Java, J2EE, WebSphere, Oracle, DB2, JavaServer Faces.

2001 – 2003

Senior Consultant

Centare Group

Application architect for the largest quality-management association in North America. Led five developers on a J2EE e-commerce portfolio with a 100,000-user base, delivered on time and on budget. Put source control, coding standards, build management, QA, and deployment practices in place.

2000 – 2001

Senior Architect

Workscape

Member of the technical architecture team. Designed application security, enterprise integration, and load-testing services. Lead Java architect on an $18 million HR self-service product for 27,000-plus customers. Team lead for 13 developers.

1998 – 2001

Senior Engineer

Johnson Controls

Designed an Oracle Financials sales-and-use tax system. Technical lead for a three-tier CRM rollout to 2,000-plus users, including on-site work in Israel. Set software-development standards for the North American operational support group. Key Contributor Award, 1999.

1995 – 1998

Senior Consultant / Staff Manager

New Resources Corporation

Designed and implemented Oracle, client/server, and early web applications.

About

John Carnell speaking on stage

I live in Cary, North Carolina with my wife, children, and our dogs Tank and Vader. I hold multiple black belts in Taekwon-Do and Shorin-Ryu karate. When I am not busy with everything else, I practice martial arts and have been learning to play the bass guitar (poorly) for the last 2.5 years.

Before Genesys, I was an integration architect at a Fortune 300 financial services company and a member of their critical response team. For the last 3.5 years I have been advocating for, and learning how to use, AI and agentic systems.

Education

University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh — Master of Business Administration, July 2009. Graduated with honors. Beta Gamma Sigma.
Marquette University — Bachelor of Arts, May 1995. Criminology and Computer Science. Howard Hughes Research Fellowship, 1995.
Adjunct faculty, Waukesha County Technical College, 2002.

Recognition

Schneider President’s Award, 2005 · Johnson Controls Key Contributor Award, 1999 · Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Thrivent, 2008 · Beta Gamma Sigma, 2009