Vetted AWS CloudFormation Professionals

Andrew Fares

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level Data Engineer specializing in AI, GenAI, and cloud data platforms

Seattle, WA4y exp

“Built production AI systems inside AWS finance/procurement, including an LLM-based supplier quote classification and price-vetting workflow that drove $5M in savings over 3 months. Combines GenAI evaluation expertise, internal platform design, and reusable Python data-quality tooling with strong cross-functional execution across finance, accounting, and hardware engineering.”

“Director of Engineering at Proofpoint for 8 years, leading architecture and integration of Java microservices within a detection platform. Demonstrates pragmatic delivery leadership—incurring short-term cost to meet launch deadlines, then systematically paying down technical debt and optimizing AWS spend—plus a disciplined, long-horizon approach to backward-compatible API/schema evolution across many dependent services.”

“Founder/idea lead behind InvantX, an AI-powered product helping people make better decisions with their own data. Developed the business model canvas and MVP plan, set up an early customer feedback loop, and iterates roadmap/architecture based on beta-user learning. Has participated in accelerators including FinAccelerate, Pegasus, and an NVIDIA program (AWS credits), and applies a metrics-driven, structured approach to traction building.”

“Engineering leader (Director of Development) with hands-on cloud and product experience who builds business-aligned technology roadmaps and scales teams. Delivered an enterprise cloud-migration enabler at UHG by implementing AD authentication and Terraform-based IaC for custom VM images while meeting 90-day InfoSec patch/rotation requirements, and drove a 20% lift in user consumption/retention by designing an interactive branded media portal experience for Sunkist.”

“Player-coach engineering leader focused on AWS ML infrastructure and deep learning image delivery: provisioned EKS/Kubernetes for multi-node training and automated image release pipelines (Python + AWS CDK) to cut release time from 2 weeks to 1. Also built customer migration tooling for SageMaker HyperPod and owned a security incident end-to-end, implementing prevention tests and process improvements.”

“Unity/C# gameplay engineer with strong systems architecture depth who has reworked core gameplay ability frameworks, shipped across mobile and standalone VR, and solved multiplayer synchronization issues with server-authoritative netcode. Also brings an unusual crossover into AI tooling, having owned an AI-powered debugging assistant at Arm and integrated LLM workflows into CI/development pipelines.”

“Robotics software engineer with hands-on ROS2 experience building an audio conversion node and integrating Whisper LiveKit for streaming speech-to-text in a simulated hostile (outer space) robot environment. Also worked on a 2023 LiDAR + ML vision obstacle-detection project for a hospital-nurse-assistant robot, and has strong large-scale CI/CD deployment experience from AWS (2022–2024) across alpha/pre-prod/prod stages.”

“Engineering leader who built and delivered an IoT smart-spaces platform for the self-storage and smart-living domains, translating customer requirements into architecture, capability maps, and a multi-milestone roadmap. Personally stood up missing AI/ML capabilities (including churn prediction) using Databricks (Delta Lake/MLflow), enabling follow-on features like energy optimization and security/anomaly detection. Scaled an org from 20 to 80+ with disciplined Agile planning (Jira Advanced Roadmaps/Confluence) and strong executive/customer-facing leadership during high-stakes customer commitments.”

“ML/LLM engineer with Stripe and Adobe experience who productionized a transformer-based Payments Foundation Model for real-time fraud detection at global scale (billions of transactions). Built petabyte-scale ETL/feature pipelines (Spark/EMR, Airflow, dbt, Kafka/Flink) and achieved <100ms multi-region inference (EKS, TorchServe, edge/Lambda, GPU/CPU routing) with strong PCI-DSS/GDPR compliance and explainability (SHAP/LIME), reporting a 64% fraud accuracy improvement.”

“Built and owned end-to-end deployment and AI support workflows spanning CI/CD, Kubernetes, Terraform, and LLM/RAG systems. Stands out for combining DevOps delivery with production AI operations, including secure tool-calling, incident debugging, retrieval quality controls, and validation-first document ingestion for messy real-world inputs.”