Dustin M. Gordon

Profile

Quality engineering and modernization leader with 20+ years in mission-critical software delivery and four years supporting IRS tax processing modernization — Form 1040-X, Kafka event streaming, and error resolution systems. Applies AI/LLM tooling to requirements analysis, legacy reverse engineering, and test design at scale. Active MBI / Public Trust clearance.

Professional experience

1. Project Manager / Requirements Lead — Sr. Quality Engineer

   Apr 2025 – Present

   S2 Technovations, Inc. · Ashburn, VA · Client: IRS (Subcontract)

   • ERS / RIVERS Modernization, Forms 94x & 1040 (Apr 2026 – Present): Serve as Project Manager and requirements lead for modernization of legacy error resolution processing, owning scope, backlog structure, and alignment across business stakeholders, analysts, and engineering.
   • Reverse-engineered undocumented legacy program logic using AI-assisted analysis, converting decades of embedded processing behavior into a documented, traceable requirements baseline that drives the modernized build — work that manual specification review could not have completed in the schedule.
   • Translated legacy screen behavior and COBOL-derived error-code logic into a typed error hierarchy and Jira epic/story structure covering validation, math, and consistency error conditions.
   • Built LLM-assisted traceability tooling reconciling extracted error codes against the delivered backlog; identified 22 uncovered form/error-code combinations and delivered a bulk-import CSV and coverage matrix that closed every gap in a single pass.
   • Kafka Event Streaming Platform (Feb 2026 – Apr 2026): Led quality engineering for an event-driven migration — validated producer and consumer contracts, topic and partition configuration, consumer-group rebalancing, and offset commit and replay behavior.
   • Verified message schema compatibility and end-to-end data integrity from source systems through stream processing into MongoDB, including dead-letter and retry paths; executed failure-injection scenarios (broker loss, consumer lag, duplicate delivery) to confirm ordering and delivery guarantees.
   • Ran LoadRunner performance testing to establish throughput and latency baselines under projected peak filing-season volumes.
   • Form 1040-X Modernization (Apr 2025 – Jan 2026): Continued automation and AI-assisted test design for amended return processing through the platform's transition to the modernized stack.

2. Senior Quality Engineer — IRS Form 1040-X Modernization

   Jul 2023 – Apr 2025

   Softcom, Inc. · Centreville, VA · Client: IRS (Subcontract)

   • Owned quality engineering for Form 1040-X (Amended U.S. Individual Income Tax Return) modernization across the full engagement, validating amended return processing against legacy baseline behavior.
   • Validated multi-column amended return logic — originally reported figures, net change, and corrected amounts — verifying recomputed tax, credits, refund, and balance-due outcomes across multiple prior tax years and filing status changes.
   • Tested Drools business rule execution, confirming rule firing order, precedence, and outcome for validation, math-error, and cross-field consistency conditions.
   • Built and maintained Java / TestNG automation suites in Eclipse with Maven builds, executed against services deployed to OpenShift (OCP) and AWS container environments.
   • Performed SOAP and REST service validation with SoapUI against XML schema definitions, covering schema compliance, business-rule rejects, and acknowledgement handling.
   • Validated MongoDB document persistence and data integrity between processing tiers.
   • Applied AI/LLM tooling to generate test data permutations, derive test cases directly from functional specifications, and cluster defects for triage — materially reducing manual test-design effort per release.

3. Senior Team Lead, Quality Engineer IV — ITPE Modernization

   May 2022 – Jul 2023

   Peraton, Inc. · Herndon, VA · Client: IRS

   • Led testing for the Individual Tax Processing Engine (ITPE) and High Volume Functional Testing (HVFT), validating tax processing logic against the Individual Master File covering millions of taxpayer records.
   • Validated conversion of millions of lines of native Assembler Language Code (ALC) to Java (ITP12, ITP15), comparing business function, posting, and analysis output between legacy and modernized engines.
   • Authored 1,000+ test cases and executed performance, functional, sanity, smoke, and back-end suites across successive filing-season releases.
   • Logged and drove 3,000+ defects to resolution during the Individual and Business Master File rebuild.
   • Automated defect recording, documentation, and execution of hundreds of test scripts, removing recurring manual effort from every release cycle.
   • Served on the SAT team for new environmental tax rules released nationwide for the following tax year.

4. Senior UAT Quality Engineer — T-Mobile

   Jan 2021 – May 2022

   NTT Data · Seattle, WA (Remote)

   • Owned final UAT acceptance and release approval for code deployed nationwide to millions of customers.
   • Executed API testing with Postman and Lighthouse, load testing, and cross-platform validation across browsers, operating systems, and iOS/Android devices via SauceLabs.
   • Performed WCAG accessibility testing on customer-facing pages serving millions of users.
   • Developed acceptance criteria from requirements, authored test plans in Jira and qTest, and presented final UAT demonstrations to stakeholders.

5. Engineer Quality Specialist — NAEP / WTDOM

   May 2018 – Jun 2020

   HII (formerly Fulcrum) · Centreville, VA

   • Built test cases and procedures for data, UI, web, and systems requirements across Kanban and SCRUM delivery.
   • Served on the CMMI Level III Internal Audit team conducting company-wide product and process audits.
   • Delivered Section 508 compliance training and testing using JAWS, NVDA, Axe, ANDI, and WAVE.
   • Wrote and executed SQL queries validating dashboard reporting, data points, and visualizations.

6. Head Quality Assurance Test Engineer

   Dec 2015 – Apr 2017

   Sestra, Inc. · Sterling, VA

   • Managed software releases for both device-side (IoT) and web applications in a startup environment.
   • Acted as SCRUM master and managed the interface between QA, Product, Development, and Operations.
   • Automated test scenarios and built automated executive reporting on release quality.

7. Senior Analytics & Operations Engineer

   Jul 2006 – Aug 2015

   Razorsight, Inc. · Reston, VA

   • Managed the Analytics Production Support team based in India, coordinating US and offshore delivery.
   • Automated end-to-end manual processes using scripting, cron, and Automate BPA Server, eliminating recurring points of failure.
   • Owned ETL workflow design for receipt and processing of large-scale telecom data files.

Earlier: Expert User / Senior Support, Broadmargin / Control Point Solutions, Fairfax, VA (Feb 2003 – Jul 2006) — telecom billing data normalization, invoice mechanization, and product support.

Selected projects & technical initiatives

• AI-Assisted Legacy Reverse Engineering

  Built LLM-driven pipelines that parse legacy functional specifications and COBOL record layouts into structured, queryable error-code models — enabling requirements baselining and traceability analysis at a scale manual review cannot reach.

• Local AI Engineering Stack

  Designed and operate a GPU-accelerated local LLM environment (Windows/WSL2, Docker, Ollama) supporting private inference, agentic coding workflows, and MCP tool integration for engineering automation.

  This is Falkor →

• Full-Stack Application Development

  Architected and maintain a multi-thousand-line vanilla JavaScript single-page CRM application, owning data model, UI, and release quality end to end.