After successes with Entertainment-focused ML initiatives and expanding into GenAI and LLM spaces, my team was moved to Amazon’s new AGI organization. This project is ongoing and is expected to launch in 2024. Details remain confidential until this project is launched.In addition to our GenAI and AGI work, my teams designed, implemented, and operated critical production services that processed all Alexa traffic.

Grew the team and hired an additional Manager and Program Manager to continue to expand our scope. Launched a new Engineering team focused on MLOps, with a mandate to build a one-stop experimentation, model training, model testing and evaluation, and model deployment infrastructure for our Science partners.

Joined an existing team of 4 Software Engineers and a mandate to accelerate and scale the output of ML Science teams. Implemented cross-functional feature-based Tiger Teams to achieve results that exceeded organizational goals, and helped Science teams learn how to build reusable components to continue to accelerate themselves. Launched Music Personalization, where Alexa would learn a Customers’ affinities and help correct imprecise requests for content. Helped scale Science team solutions to Alexa’s hundreds of millions of customers, which helped us achieve 6x our goal target for personalized interventions and correction of Music defects in 2021. Launched the organization’s first realtime model hosting services to impact customer traffic via runtime ML models, where previously all models released were offline ML solutions that impacted customer traffic via downstream artifact deployment. Contributed to the launch of personalized conversational FireTV Search experiences as showcased by Dave Limp, VP of Devices and Services, in September 2022. This program began Amazon’s transition to LLM-based Alexa as showcased by Dave Limp, VP of Devices and Services, in September 2023, and contributed to my team’s transition to the newly-formed Amazon Artificial General Intelligence organization.

Joined Alexa Devices (part of Lab126) to form a device-side Media software team. Owned the Alexa Media Player, an on-device software stack responsible for Music experiences on all Alexa-powered devices (Amazon and 3P branded) across Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, SiriusXM, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and more. Expanded the team’s charter from Music experiences to also include Video experiences including Hulu, NBC, and Vevo. Ran the design, development, and launch of multiple new technologies for Alexa Devices including an extensible web video infrastructure, Alexa’s Apple Music implementation, overlapping clusters for Whole Home Audio experiences, and more. Designed the team’s first emergency software OTA system which allowed hotfixes to be deployed to customer devices in hours, as opposed to waiting for the multi-week release train. Handled technical communications related to Media experiences across over a dozen internal Amazon teams, third-party content providers, third-party device manufacturers, and presented updates across all these areas to the Alexa Devices Vice President multiple times per week. Secured promotions for team members, grew the team to 12 members, and kept unplanned turnover at zero.

Led a team of Software Engineers and System Engineers responsible for software, systems, and network infrastructure for AWS Storage Gateway, a rapidly growing data ingestion and storage service. Successfully scaled to handle the rapid growth of a new AWS service, via both process and infrastructure changes, to handle a 300% YOY traffic increase and dozens of petabytes per month of new data ingestion. Expanded the service to cover all 15 public (at the time) AWS regions as well as some non-public regions. Ran a successful effort to obtain HIPAA eligibility in 4 months, opening the door to several large customers in the medical and insurance industries. Technical lead in the establishment of a partner relationship with Dell, and handled ongoing technical communications and specifications related to the launch of the first AWS hardware product available for customer purchase. Secured promotions for multiple team members and held unplanned turnover to a single engineer in a highly demanding environment.

Owned WBIE’s videogame publishing platform-as-a-service (WBPlay), used by multiple studios under the WBIE umbrella for AAA videogame releases on Xbox, PlayStation, iOS, Android, and Windows PC’s. Initiated a reorganization and by the end of my first year employee morale, satisfaction, and productively increased, and turnover fell from 12 positions in 2014 to 2 in 2015. Staff included Managers, Engineers, QA, Architects, Performance Engineers, Account Managers, DevOps, and Support Services. Ran clean-slate design and implementation of the first WBPlay PaaS specifically geared towards in-game functionality (online player profiles, chat, matchmaking, leaderboards, friend networks, microtransactions, etc.) for AAA game titles. This multi-tenant system was built to withstand landslide-scale AAA game title launches (40M+ active users, up to 50K+ TPS on some individual titles) via intelligent software architecture and scalable cloud hosting infrastructure. Stateless microservices hosted together in individual “full platform” containers allowed for seamless scalability (up and down) and fault tolerance. Moved all platform components from proprietary datacenters to Amazon Web Services.Awarded a MongoDB Innovation Award in 2015 for innovations in MongoDB usage on Mortal Kombat X, and the team presented a highly successful session at Amazon’s 2015 AWS re:Invent based on experiences gained from the Mortal Kombat X launch: “Turbine: A Microservice Approach to Three Billion Game Requests a Day” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txJmBA4cdQM).

Key member of the Management Team responsible for setting and executing on strategic priorities across all departments in line with the organization’s mission. Responsible for all software development, networking, and hardware infrastructure for both customer-facing and internal applications, including internal lab robotics and automation. Transitioned company from a failure-prone on-premises single server configuration to a hosted datacenter rack which included redundant application and database servers on VMWare and Linux behind a load balancer. Prior to this all planned and unplanned downtime resulted in both internal and customer-facing systems going completely offline, costing the company both internal productivity and external sales. Combined with process changes, release mechanisms, and a scalable Git branching strategy to increase developer productivity, reduced system downtime from an average of 8 hours per month to 0.

Responsible for Management of technical staff across 5 technical teams (web, API, mobile, desktop, and back-end call control), reporting to the Vice President of Software Development. Responsible for Architectural decisions across all product lines, and owner of the company’s first iPhone app (architecture, design, and development). Initiated the company’s transition from TDM (traditional telephony) to SIP (VOIP protocol) on FreeSWITCH and openSIPS, hired experts in SIP technologies to deliver, and opened more flexibility for future products via this transition. Worked with the VP to architect a seamless failover across company-owned datacenters (Boston, MA and Austin, TX), based largely on Oracle’s GoldenGate technology.

Responsible for Management of all technical staff across 4 technical teams (back-end, front-end, database, and network infrastructure), reporting directly to the President. Implemented standard Agile Software Development practices & helped map out a 3-year plan for the company as a whole. Solely responsible for the long-term technology roadmap. Core offering was 5 web sites with 1M+ unique visitors per month and a network of an additional 25 feeder sites. Expanded the team and brought Software Engineering best practices to a small fast-moving startup. Introduced new technologies and expanded the vision of what the company was capable of doing by architecting key new software products.

Technical Management/Direction/Planning/Strategy for the entire software and hardware product lines of a large educational publishing company. Member of the senior management team helping to set strategy and direction as well as make policy for the division as a whole. Extensive experience with all facets of business including engineering, legal proceedings, sales, marketing, implementations, customer service and technical support, quality assurance, and operations. Extensive experience and knowledge in the publishing and educational arenas.

Technical Management/Direction/Planning for one of the company's three product lines. Contributing Engineer to another product line.

Technical Management for one of the company's three product lines. Contributing Engineer to another product line.

Recruited by Ray Kurzweil to be the second full-time Engineer 8 months after the company was founded, and the first Engineer to develop Kurzweil 3000, a multiple-award-winning compensatory reading software application for students with mild to severe reading disabilities. Released v1 of Kurzweil 3000 within four months using languages and technologies I had little to no prior experience with. Sole architect and developer of Kurzweil 3000 Network Edition, Kurzweil 3000 “License to Go” functionality (allowing institutions to loan out licenses for a period of time without access to the network(, and encryption schemes used in the company's flexible software licensing systems. Developed, selected, and utilized advanced technologies including scanning, imaging, OCR, voice recognition, voice synthesis, and lexical parsing. Worked directly with customers and resellers to resolve complex technical issues. I am the inventor of patented technologies related to the software.

Selected to be a member of the company’s first team to focus on clinical medical systems, went on to present training sessions for the entire Engineering staff in addition to my Engineering duties.