Principal Engineer · compsci.boutique
data platforms · identity & security · distributed compute · autonomous systems
20+ years taking ambiguous problems to production — architecture, implementation, and operation. A decade at a Fortune 500 lighting company building self-service platform, security/identity, governed analytics, and petabyte-scale data infrastructure on AWS. My most recent work is autonomous agent systems that run the full delivery lifecycle with humans in the loop.
Semantic IoT lakehouse: Sparkplug B telemetry → serverless fan-out → Iceberg on S3, with a sub-10ms metadata store and a CDC-synced Brick ontology graph — SQL and SPARQL joined on one stable key, 10–60s device-to-queryable, zero warehouses. Case study →
Data contracts as a governance layer: unified Glue tables, versioned validation (JSON Schema / Avro / Protobuf), cross-account metadata search, OpenMetadata (contributor), Lake Formation row-level policy.
Designed and implemented an OIDC SSO + token-delegation service that became the reference implementation every other team adopted; read-through DynamoDB cache scaled to 10K+ req/s in load testing, offloading AWS Cloud Directory.
Externally-consumed platform APIs: governed query/search services, authorization integrated into analytics tooling from a shared identity model — plus global delivery (Hong Kong launch, AWS-to-China replication patterns for an external cloud).
A distributed compute framework — Pydantic-validated jobs, PostgreSQL work ring, DynamoDB state, ephemeral EKS workers on spot with auto-recovery — applied to malware scanning across 10+ PB under $30K.
The pattern I reach for: serverless and event-driven (Streams / Firehose) for the async data path, long-running services on Fargate where cache state and latency budgets demand it. Cost, reliability, and correctness are design constraints, not afterthoughts.
An AI agent orchestrator running autonomous coding agents through the full GitHub lifecycle — issue → PR → review → merge → release — with per-agent scoring and self-healing; author of four, an agent algebra where every agent composes four functions over shared evaluation — the loop built its own toolchain →
150K+ lines of AI-written code shipped at enterprise scale — I practice what I build. Local-first LLMs (llama.cpp / vLLM), vision and screen automation, and Pipecat voice pipelines.
I'm a senior engineer for hire — contract or consult — who owns systems end to end: the API contract, the data contract, the identity policy, the cost envelope, and the on-call reality. Send me a hard platform problem and I'll tell you honestly whether it's a fit — and how I'd solve it.
HIRE / HIRE-OUT SEE THE ICE GRAPH CASE STUDY SEE FOUR — THE AGENT ALGEBRA ALLOC — RL PORTFOLIO ENGINE PERSONAL-INDEX — WEB SEARCH ENGINE