Software engineering leader with over 20 years’ experience building strong technical teams and delivering and operating large-scale distributed systems.
Experience
Sr Data Architect, AI/ML, AWS Professional Services, 2021 to present
Drove an effort to “whitelist” AWS Glue for an global financial institution and delivered a working PoC for a new, cloud-based analytics platform. (AWS Glue, Apache Iceberg, AWS Lambda, Apache Airflow, Amazon EKS, Amazon Athena, Terraform.)
Delivered a proof-of-concept (PoC) and built out a backlog for an event-driven, real-time dashboard for managing call center queues for a leading Insurance provider. (Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, Amazon DynamoDB, Grafana, CDK.)
Established a data lake in Amazon S3 for a multinational industrial conglomerate. (Apache Kafka, AWS Lambda, AWS Glue, Amazon SageMaker, Apache Spark, Apache Iceberg, Terraform.)
Director, Data Platform Engineering, Comcast, 2010 to 2021
Led teams of managers, engineers and analysts to deliver 6 fully integrated and self-service data platforms for storage (S3 data lake), compute (Spark), streaming (Kafka/Kinesis), querying (Presto), metadata management (Atlas) and a customer-facing portal (microservices).
Managed geographically distributed teams across the US, Europe, and Asia.
Managed an effort to decommission legacy systems and migrate users over to our new data platforms to decrease operational costs and to meet regulatory mandates (CPRA/GDPR).
Volunteered and selected to represent the department in an enterprise-wide DevSecOps program to promote modern and security-minded software development practices. Developed the roadmap to onboard all 38 engineering teams within our department to the program and delivered on all quarterly goals in 2020.
Established our department’s first “FinOps” team with full oversight of AWS budget spend resulting in over $1M in OpEx savings in our first year.
Deployed a “fair-share” chargeback model for our streaming platform to help our senior leadership and finance partners quantify ROI and the efficiencies of scale delivered by the platform.
Rolled out training and achieved my goal to have over 25% of engineers reporting to me AWS certified by the end of 2020.
Selected for the pilot cohort of an enterprise-wide leadership development program (Xcelerate) designed to support career growth of promising, director-level candidates at Comcast.
Migrated our on-premises data analytics footprint (Oracle/Hadoop) to the cloud (AWS) improving our resiliency and throughput tenfold.
Led a team building ETL pipelines and providing reporting capabilities in support of the rollout of Comcast’s flagship X1 video platform.
Technical Architect, Yell Adworks (formerly Pindar Set), 2005 to 2010
Designed and oversaw the implementation of key components of a globally distributed J2EE workflow and digital ad creation system developed by offshore engineering teams.
Seconded to the US to build a data warehouse for the company’s rapidly growing US business.
Software Development Team Leader, Pindar Set Ltd, 2000 to 2005
Led a small team of engineers building a distributed workflow system for website creation in Perl and automating management reports.
Developed an application in Java to digitize phone directories to make them searchable and viewable on CD-ROM.
IT Consultant, Logica Plc, 1998 to 2000
Provided on-site development and support of billing systems for a major energy supplier.
Education
MSc in IT (Software and Systems), University of Glasgow, UK.
BA (Hons) in Russian,
University of Wales, Swansea.
Moscow State University, Russian Federation.