Resume

Lead Data Engineer · Greater Chicago Area

Experience

Jan 2025 - Present · Chicago, IL

Design and build generative AI on Amazon Bedrock, including knowledge bases over client documents, with pre-processing that absorbs high-volume loads and batch ingestion from S3.
Lead an AI cost visibility project for a client, using Bedrock inference profiles and cost analytics to track what AI workloads spend.
Led the full deployment of Amazon Quick, the AI studio: Identity Center integration, group management and custom knowledge bases.
Lead a rapid AI assessment for a prospective customer as a key member of the pre-sales team.
Advise on query performance, data migrations, loading Amazon OpenSearch from S3, and scalable patterns for EKS workloads.

Led the migration from Talend to Apache Airflow on Amazon MWAA, retiring a six-figure annual license and integrating AWS Secrets Manager and S3.
Served as interim tech lead, setting technical direction, planning sprints and keeping stakeholders aligned.
Designed and delivered a PII redaction service on ECS, with a Python FastAPI layer on Lambda, for HIPAA-aligned data handling.
Led SQL Server performance tuning, including indexing, partitioning and execution plan analysis, which improved pipeline throughput and data quality.
Introduced the team's first Git-based source control practice and owned delivery end to end, with Terraform and CI/CD for every service.

2021 - Jan 2025 · Fargo, ND

Engineered across GCP, Azure and AWS, automating provisioning and CI/CD with Terraform and Azure DevOps Pipelines.
Kept running the big data platform I had designed, while expanding into Kubernetes, Linux and Windows Server administration and security tooling.

Led a team of data engineers building a BigQuery and GCS data platform orchestrated with Airflow.
Set up Spark on Kubernetes for large-scale distributed processing, with all infrastructure in Terraform.
Added pipeline monitoring and alerting, tuned jobs and queries, and mentored junior engineers.

2021 · Omaha, NE

Designed the data lake and warehouse on AWS S3 serving QuickSight and SageMaker.
Built PySpark ETL on AWS Glue and ingestion from RDS and DynamoDB.
Created a serverless app using Step Functions and Lambda to monitor and retry Glue workflows.

2020 - 2021 · Naperville, IL

Led architecture and implementation of serverless data pipelines on Glue, S3, Athena and Aurora.
Wrote Python ETL (pandas, NumPy) for business-critical pipelines and advised on testing and deployment.

2019 - 2020 · Chicago, IL

Automated business processes with Python on Jupyter, built dashboards, and created a Postgres master data management database.
Reduced risk by fixing bash and PHP scripts in a Salesforce data pipeline.

2018 - 2019 · Chicago, IL

Led enterprise architecture strategy and ran a data lake on AWS Redshift Spectrum.
Reduced operating costs by over $100,000 through workflow automation.

2016 - 2017 · Chicago, IL

Advised researchers on scholarly communication and DOE scientific and technical information compliance.

2013 - 2016 · River Forest, IL

Led development of a SharePoint portal, supervised a service desk of eight, and provided data governance for an open-source publication database.

Languages

PythonSQLBashGo

AWS

S3GlueAthenaRedshiftStep FunctionsLambdaECSMWAASecrets ManagerEKSAmazon Quick

Data and orchestration

AirflowSpark on KubernetesBigQuerySQL ServerPySpark

DevOps

TerraformCI/CDAzure DevOpsKubernetesSnykRenovate

AI and search

Amazon BedrockBedrock Knowledge BasesBedrock inference profilesAmazon OpenSearch

Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS), Dominican University
B.A. Public Relations, Advertising, and Applied Communication, Elmhurst University
Studied at Oxford University

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (Issued May 2026, valid to May 2029)
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (Renewed Jan 2025, valid to May 2029)