Developer Spotlight: Brady Root, Foundation for Trusted Identity

Brady Root got his start in tech in 2013 with an Associate’s degree in Computer Networking from Bellingham Technical College in Washington state. Shortly before graduating, he was offered an IT/Help Desk internship at a software company in town, which turned into a job after he received his degree. This was followed by a position as a technician for an outsourced IT shop before he and his wife moved to Texas, where he now works for the Foundation for Trusted Identity, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing adoption of federally certified strong identification credentials. In that position he's grown from IT support to development and now manages the organization's web infrastructure.

FTI provides PIV-I cards and other federally cross-certified credentials to entities like state and local governments. To do so, they remotely onboard clients from all across the country. Having clients print, sign, scan, and upload was tedious and time-consuming, so Brady and his team decided to integrate Docusign embedded signing into their onboarding portal and processes.

On the FTI onboarding portal, customers input their information (email, name, title, and so on), which is used to populate fields on an agreement in an envelope using a template Brady's team created in Docusign. On a specific button click, the envelope is generated and displayed to the customer. This is done by sending an AJAX request with the appropriate information to the Docusign eSignature REST API, including a JWT token generated by FTI. If different signers or roles are necessary for a given document, the other parties are emailed a link that will bring them to an embedded signing page on the FTI site as well. When the appropriate customers have signed, FTI personnel are notified to do the final signing using the Docusign Connect notification service, which sends all the necessary documents and signing info to the FTI API. Once a document is signed by all parties, Docusign Connect is then leveraged again to send the final document’s PDF data back to FTI.

Brady is currently working on a bachelor’s degree, which he plans to finish next year. In their spare time, he and his wife take hikes and bike rides and enjoy watching Spurs games with their dog. ;-) You can reach Brady at brady.root@fti.org or find him on LinkedIn.