Bennett Smith

About

Backend/data engineer with strong AWS production experience spanning high-traffic FastAPI APIs (Postgres/Redis/Kafka) and serverless+container deployments (Lambda/ECS) managed via Terraform and CI/CD. Has built Glue-based data lake ETL (S3 Parquet, Athena/Redshift) with schema drift/data quality controls, modernized legacy batch systems via parallel-run parity validation, and demonstrated measurable SQL performance wins (60–90s down to 3–5s).

Key Strengths

• Designed and operated high-traffic FastAPI services with Postgres/Redis and Kafka-based async processing
• Reliability engineering: OAuth2/JWT auth, strict timeouts, idempotency, exponential-backoff retries, standardized 4xx/5xx error boundaries, trace IDs
• AWS delivery across Lambda + ECS with Terraform IaC and automated CI/CD (blue-green/rolling/canary with health checks and rollback)
• Strong configuration/secrets hygiene using Parameter Store/Secrets Manager and least-privilege IAM per service
• Built AWS Glue ETL to S3 partitioned Parquet with Data Catalog/Crawlers; implemented schema drift checks and data quality validation
• Modernized legacy batch logic into modular Python services using historical replay, parallel runs, stakeholder sign-off, feature flags, and incremental cutover
• SQL performance tuning with measured impact (reduced query runtime from ~60–90s to ~3–5s by indexing and sargable rewrites)
• Owned batch/ETL incident response: CloudWatch/SNS detection, log/metric triage, checkpointed reprocessing, and preventative validation/runbooks

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