Jonah Grimes

Lead architect for IHG's web-based digital channel experiences, owning end-to-end solution design across product, engineering, infrastructure, security, and third-party ecosystems to deliver high-impact capabilities to guests and colleagues across 7,000+ properties worldwide.

• Serve as primary architect for IHG's Hotel Content Modernization initiative, leading internal and third-party stakeholders to migrate hotel content across all IHG properties to the Censhare Content Management Platform — replacing a 15-year-old home-grown legacy system, eliminating a data center dependency, and delivering a graph-based content model that enables richer brand and hotel differentiation through extensible content types including floor plans, virtual tours, and immersive media experiences.
• Lead solution design, prototyping, and stakeholder alignment for IHG's AI-first flagship initiatives — including the IHG ChatGPT App and Conversational Search Agent — coordinating across 8 teams spanning engineering, product, middleware, operations, security, architecture, and external vendor partners to deliver IHG's first production agentic search experiences, with both initiatives featured in IHG investor and public relations communications.
• Lead payments architecture for IHG's web digital channel, delivering PayPal Braintree and Apple Pay integrations and providing ongoing solutioning guidance for payments capabilities across the guest-facing customer journey.
• Leveraged cross-initiative observations from IHG's AI program to identify a strategic capability gap in hotel search and discovery, developing a comprehensive architecture roadmap for the Hotel Intelligence Ecosystem that proposed significant expansion of up-funnel destination discovery in the guest-facing customer journey.
• Improved hotel search performance across digital channels by 40% through global deployment of GraphQL and OpenSearch, delivering a faster, more relevant search experience for IHG guests at scale.
• Establish and maintain architecture standards across Web, Search, Content Management, and GraphQL API domains; lead annual scorecard reviews across 12+ applications to identify gaps, reduce technical debt, and drive alignment with enterprise architectural standards.

Served as primary technical success architect for a portfolio of 10 strategic enterprise accounts — including Fortune 200 and Fortune 500 clients — driving adoption of feature management and product experimentation practices across complex, large-scale software delivery organizations.

• Guided enterprise customers through complex application modernization and technology migration initiatives as the Center of Excellence's subject matter expert, accelerating time-to-value and reducing delivery risk.
• Designed and delivered scalable onboarding content and professional services offerings that integrated feature management and experimentation seamlessly into existing engineering workflows, improving platform adoption across new and expanding accounts.
• Built frontend, backend, and mobile quick-start reference applications across multiple languages and frameworks, establishing idiomatic best practices for LaunchDarkly platform integration at scale.

Managed a high-performing delivery team, orchestrating cloud architecture and DevOps enhancements on Amazon Web Services for multiple concurrent clients, maximizing the potential of cloud technology for their workloads.

• Collaborated with C-level executives, senior management, architecture, engineering, and operations teams to ensure adherence to AWS best practices, optimizing client environments for cloud-based operations.
• Designed and maintained sophisticated cloud-based distributed systems, utilizing infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, and CDK.

Aligned business priorities and initiatives with technology solutions, devising a strategic technical roadmap to drive the digital transformation of core product offerings. Established a cloud center of excellence, empowering product delivery teams to build their best software while adhering to well-established best practices for security, reliability, performance efficiency, operational excellence, and cost optimization on Amazon Web Services.

• Crafted a strategic technical roadmap that played a pivotal role during Equifax's due diligence and acquisition of Appriss Insights for $1.8 billion.
• Managed a $2.4 million cloud infrastructure budget across multiple software engineering teams, recommending architectural improvements that reduced overall operational costs by 15%.
• Migrated workloads from Docker to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, improving scalability and operational efficiency.
• Reduced security vulnerability remediation time for the Enhanced VINE product suite from weeks to hours.
• Optimized operational costs for Kinesis and Amazon RDS, achieving over 25% cost reduction while doubling system capacity.
• Improved SOC2, FedRAMP, and StateRAMP audit outcomes by implementing Argo CD, Backstage, and GitHub to increase cross-team collaboration and documentation visibility.

Led architecture and development of the event-driven entity resolution and search platform powering PMP AWARxE — a national real-time prescription monitoring system tracking patient dispensation history across healthcare providers.

• Created a Java-based framework for entity resolution and consolidated search, significantly reducing the time needed to implement new entity resolution algorithms from months to just days.
• Engineered scalable algorithms for entity resolution, efficiently managing over 2 billion unique vertices and tens of billions of edge connections, while maintaining sub-second search response times.
• Built and operated a robust 27-node Apache Cassandra cluster on Amazon Web Services, ensuring reliable and high-performance data storage and retrieval, while meeting HIPAA confidentiality requirements.

Built full-stack investigative and background screening applications for law enforcement and commercial clients, leveraging early NoSQL and cloud technologies to deliver real-time data processing at scale.

• Spearheaded the development of RiskCheckNow, a web and API-based background screening product catering to incarceration, justice, and risk intelligence markets.
• Selected Cassandra as the foundation for entity resolution workloads, enabling real-time data processing and sub-second search response times at scale.

Developed and managed business logic and data transformation components for a high-scale integration broker, facilitating the migration from legacy mainframe-based airline operations and scheduling platforms. This transition reduced system coupling and enabled swift design and implementation of new data transformations.

• Constructed efficient web-based internal tools using Macromedia ColdFusion, streamlining departmental business processes for multiple cross-functional units within the UPS air group division.
• Provided crucial support and data modeling design guidance for the large-scale migration of end-user computing data from Microsoft Access to Oracle Enterprise, ensuring a smooth and successful transition.