Senior Software Engineer

About

Senior Software Engineer with 10 years of experience building scalable backend systems, AWS-native architectures, and production ingestion pipelines. Technical lead on modernization initiatives supporting mission-critical global publishing workflows at Amazon. Experienced in Kotlin, Java, Python, and serverless AWS ecosystems. Applied AI consultant designing modular RAG and agent-based automation platforms. Known for strong operational ownership, mentoring engineers, and delivering measurable improvements to system performance, reliability, and developer productivity.

Skills

Languages

Kotlin Java Python SQL TypeScript React Angular

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS Lambda S3 DynamoDB SQS Kinesis Step Functions CloudFormation CDK Docker Serverless CI/CD Git

Backend Engineering

REST APIs Data Pipelines Secure Ingestion Observability

Data & Analytics

Metrics Pipelines SQL Analytics QuickSight Geospatial Data

AI & Automation

RAG Agent Orchestration LLM Workflows OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini Prompt Engineering

Experience

Amazon

Software Development Engineer II

Remote

Sep 2020 – Present
  • Led the redesign of a mission-critical ebook asset ingestion platform, consolidating bifurcated ingestion paths, modernizing legacy procedural code, and introducing extensible, polymorphic architectures — reduced attribute development effort by 35%, increased ingestion throughput by 55%, and lowered support burden by 20%
  • Served as the team's AI adoption lead, evaluating and prototyping LLM-powered tooling, integrating AI-assisted workflows into engineering processes; built a CLI leveraging Amazon Q to automatically port legacy procedural code to Kotlin with comprehensive unit tests, increasing migration velocity by 75%
  • Designed and implemented backend services and APIs in Kotlin and Java to support near-real-time and batch ingestion workflows processing thousands of files per day for global publishers
  • Owned production deployments and AWS infrastructure using CDK, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, Step Functions, Kinesis, and SQS, ensuring secure ingestion pipelines with encryption at rest/in transit
  • Actively participated in on-call rotations, leading incident response, postmortems, and preventative fixes for ingestion and metadata processing systems
  • Mentored 5 engineers and 2 interns and conducted ~100 technical and behavioral interviews

Amazon

Software Development Engineer I

San Luis Obispo, CA

Apr 2019 – Sep 2020
  • Played a key role in merging two massive, disparate legacy content management systems into a single unified stack (Angular/Kotlin), eliminating redundant infrastructure
  • Implemented shadow-read integration patterns to safely migrate an asset ingestion search backend from a legacy platform to Elasticsearch with zero downtime
  • Implemented integrations with AWS services including SQS, Kinesis, and Lambdas

Amazon

Support Engineer III

San Luis Obispo, CA

Jul 2018 – Apr 2019
  • Delivered operational improvements and monitoring enhancements reducing production incidents
  • Rapidly promoted to SDE I in under 8 months by demonstrating SDE-level coding contributions and deep system understanding

Independent Consultant

AI & Software Engineering

Remote

2024 – Present
  • Architected modular Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) platform for enterprise document intelligence workflows
  • Designed agent-based orchestration system automating large-scale document processing tasks
  • Built model-agnostic infrastructure supporting OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini APIs
  • Delivered automation workflows reducing repeated manual processing effort by 70%

Agrible, Inc.

Software Engineer

Champaign, IL

Dec 2015 – Jun 2018
  • Designed and implemented a hail monitoring application processing multiple live radar-derived products to provide actionable alerts to 100+ farmers within 60 seconds of detection
  • Built scalable backend services in Python using Pandas/NumPy/SciPy to process terabytes of agronomic model data
  • Optimized PostgreSQL and MongoDB query patterns to handle daily ingestion of gigabytes of environmental data
  • Served as Scrum Master for a team of 8, improving sprint velocity by 15% through process optimization

CRETMO

Co-Founder & Lead Engineer

Champaign, IL

2014 – 2018
  • Co-founded a medical IoT startup developing wearable devices to reduce repetitive strain injuries for manual wheelchair users
  • Led end-to-end hardware and software engineering, including embedded firmware (C/C++), sensor data processing, and Bluetooth mobile integrations
  • Partnered with Mayo Clinic for clinical research trials, resulting in a granted U.S. patent and peer-reviewed publications

Education

M.S. Civil & Environmental Engineering

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Focus: Autonomous Systems & Robotics

Scholarship: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Scholar

Thesis: Developed an autonomous ground rover for agricultural sub-canopy sensing using LIDAR, RTK GPS, Computer Vision and Python.

B.S. Atmospheric Sciences

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Core CS: Data Structures & Algorithms, Distributed Systems, OOP, Database Design

Capstone: Developed interactive stereoscopic satellite imagery visualization software for NASA JPL (MISR Mission).

Publications & Patent

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