Steve Stalzer Email & Phone Number

Boston, Ma, Us

Boston, Ma, Us

Technical strategy, mentoring, and implementation assistance for early stage EdTechs, with a focus on helping portfolio companies collect and leverage data and Artificial Intelligence to accelerate growth.

Ternium AI understands the challenges companies face when prototyping, building, and commercializing their AI strategy and vision. With experience in diverse industries like communications, education, and gaming, Ternium brings AI-powered products to life, "from vision to market."At Ternium, I partner directly with founders, CEOs, and CTOs to envision, architect, build, and deploy customer-facing, AI-enabled applications that are intelligent, reliable, scalable, and transformative. We are generally technology agnostic, but fluent in diverse approaches which leverage relational and no-SQL databases, data lake architectures (e.g.,Databricks), graph databases (e.g., Neo4j), LLMs, multi-modal models, AI training frameworks (Azure AI Studio, Vertex AI, Sagemaker, OpenAI, Replicate, TensorFlow, PyTorch), AI validation frameworks (Trulens, DeepEval), and much more!

New York, Ny, Us

I partner with McGraw Hill’s product, portfolio, and engineering organizations to envision, research, prototype, and commercialize AI-enabled educational solutions across all of our business units. Wins include the creation of a proprietary neural network, trained on thousands of examples of student and AI writing, to enable instructors to detect the use of AI by their students (TensorFlow, PyTorch); a user retention risk classifier; multiple graph database projects (Neo4j's AuraDB, AuraDS) to model complex user journeys, skills, and performance data and develop insights and inferences; research and fine-tuning of a broad range of large language models to use in content generation (GPT, Llama, Claude, Gemini, Stable Diffusion, etc.) ; AI-generated metadata tagging of thousands of ebooks, using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and summarization techniques; and chain-of-thought prompting workflows for LLM testing and output validation.

New York, Ny, Us

McGraw-Hill is a learning science company dedicated to improving student outcomes by leveraging data science and analytics. As part of the Digital Platform Group, I led the data platform, reporting, and data science teams to bring innovative descriptive and predictive analytical insights to all of our online products.Highlights include commercializing a real time streaming platform (Kakfa / Spark) which ingests highly structured events and maintains a complex semantic taxonomy representing behavioral interactions across all of our K-12 and Higher Education products; researching, publishing, and building machine learning models to infer student procrastination and likelihood of negative student learning outcomes; extending a popular knowledge tracing algorithm (Performance Factors Analysis) to incorporate memory decay to improve estimation of student knowledge states across hundreds of skills; and implementing a graph of student knowledge states using PFA and Neo4J which enables learning personalization through prediction of the next best skill to teach.

Authess was a learning technologies start-up that used artificial intelligence and natural language processing to expose and measure critical competencies to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving workplace (acquired by Elsevier).I led the technology strategy and the data science, front-end, and back-end engineering teams, (Angular/node, NLP, AI, Spark, Airflow), including the development of IP such as near-real time student behavior modeling, student affect detection, and automated open-response scoring for assessments.

Needham, Massachusetts, Us

Responsible for the development, deployment, and operations of several Big Data platforms which use multiple technologies on AWS including Kafka, Spark, Hadoop (EMR), Looker, Presto, Redshift, and Vertica, to provide descriptive and predictive analytical insights across the Warner Brothers Games portfolio. As a product owner, defined the vision and requirements for a real-time data streaming platform based on Spark, built the team competencies, and managed the backlog and deliveries to deploy it on the first mobile game title from Turbine. As a manager of three technical teams (Java/Scala developers, data warehouse engineers, and DevOps) I supported data scientists, business analysts, and marketers to increase engagement, retention, and monetization for some of the most well-known games in the industry, including Shadow of Mordor, Injustice Gods Among Us, Mortal Combat X, Batman Arkham Knight, and Batman Arkham Underworld.

Eindhoven, North Brabant, Nl

Built a Common Data Asset and Data Lake platform (EMR, S3) in Amazon Web Services to support a broad variety of analytics users and use cases – including reporting, machine learning, and recommendations - across HERE (e.g. Maps, Places, Traffic, and Social). Migrated internal customers from an expensive "bare metal" Hadoop infrastructure to the CDA in the cloud, decreasing costs and improving performance of massive workloads. Worked to provide a single, unified, and secure “360 degree” view of customers across all touchpoints.

Espoo, Southern Finland, Fi

Integrated and supported internal customer teams on top of our Big Data Analytics Platform (Hadoop, Hive) and Amazon Web Services (EMR, S3, EC2) to support Search, Places, Maps, Traffic, and Drive. Managed a team of system and Hadoop engineers, as well as product and program managers. Responsible for all Customer Support initiatives including working directly with data scientists across the company.

Espoo, Southern Finland, Fi

DataOS is Nokia's Cloud infrastructure, responsible for storing and analyzing petabytes of data on Cloudera Hadoop. Responsible for scaling processes, planning, requirements, and deliveries for a growing list of customers who wish to store and analyze vast amounts of semi and unstructured data.

Espoo, Southern Finland, Fi

Responsible for delivery and support of the company's first "full web" browser using Webkit on millions of Nokia handsets for key mega-operators including T-Mobile Int’l, TMO-US, Vodafone, CMCC, and AT&T.

Espoo, Southern Finland, Fi

Responsible for managing the quality engineering team for the Nokia mobile browser, designed to handle mobile-optimized web content (XHTML Mobile Profile, WAP CSS, ECMAScript, WML) and integrate with platform services such as Email, Telephony, and Calendar.

Founded and led a software start-up which developed web analytics services for hyper local small and medium sized retail and service businesses.

Administrator and instructor for general music, computer science, and band within several K-8 schools.

Master Of Education - Med, Human Development

Ba, Computers And Music