Cloud Solutions Engineer

GARY SMITH

LEAD CLOUD SOLUTIONS ENGINEER FINTECH MODERNISATION AWS–PRO CERTIFIED

Charlotte, NC • 618-***-**** • *******@*****.*** • LinkedIn: Gary Smith

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Cloud Architect who rebuilds regulated finance stacks for scale, cost control, and zero downtime change. Led AWS shifts that cut nightly outages, slashed deployments from weeks to days, and now folds Gen AI RAG and crypto rails into real time services.

CORE EXPERTISE

AWS (EKS, ECS, Lambda, Aurora PG, DynamoDB, SNS/SQS, Cognito) Platform Engineering & DevOps FinOps Governance Domain-Driven Design Real-Time Payments & Trading Gen-AI / RAG Integration Security & Compliance Automation Cross-Site Team Leadership

KEY ACHIEVEMENTS

●Cloud Database Migration — Account-data team lead in a 10-team AWS move; worked with Enterprise Architecture and peer squads to shift 200 on-prem SQL databases to Aurora clusters, ending the nightly 8-hour batch and giving advisors near-real-time account updates.

●Continuous-Delivery Pipeline: Rolled out the firm’s first end-to-end CI/CD stack; deploy cycles fell from 6 weeks to less than a day, a transformation that earned the NC Tech “Business Value” Award.

●Gen-AI Code-Review Automation: Built an LLM pull-request bot that frees reviewers 25% of their time and trims escaped defects 10%, proving AI can operate inside SOX and FINRA pipelines.

●Native AWS Bot Platform Savings: Replaced a high-cost RPA suite with Lambda-based bots, redirecting mid-six-figure annual spend to new product features.

●Trading Latency Optimization: Cut order-routing time 15%, protecting multi-million-dollar intraday trades from price drift and improving client execution quality.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

INDEPENDENT R&D / UPSKILLING PROJECTS

(Self-directed innovation sprints completed during planned career break) Jan 2025 - Present

●Automated Code Reviews: Architected an LLM-powered pull-request bot on Lambda with multi-model fallback; reviewers reclaim 25 % of their week while defect escape falls 10 %.

●Custom RAG Layer: Added Retrieval-Augmented Generation so each client feeds house style guides into the model, eliminating inconsistent reviews and follow-up fixes.

●Crypto Settlement Gateway: Prototype API lets merchants take crypto at checkout yet receive USD in their bank—abstracts custody, FX, and compliance behind a single call.

●Real-Time Notification Mesh: Designed an event-driven path (SNS topic SQS queue WebSocket micro-service) that broadcasts pull-request updates to any number of online reviewers within seconds; pattern can also deliver instant trade alerts without polling.

●Audit-Ready by Default: Infra declared in SAM/CloudFormation, tagged for cost dashboards, and secured with Cognito/JWT—meeting PCI and SOC 2 expectations from day one.

LPL FINANCIAL

Vice President, Technology (Cloud & Platform) Dec 2020 - Dec 2024

●Account Database Cloud Migration: Led the account-data track in a 10-team AWS migration, replacing 200 on-prem SQL databases with Aurora Postgres clusters with a single REST API. Teams now pull live balances via API, cutting new-client onboarding from weeks to days.

●Streaming Account Updates: Replaced nightly batch loads with Glue Jobs that post changes instantly; advisors stay logged in and trade uninterrupted, boosting daily volume and wiping out update-time complaints.

●Institutional Onboarding Portal: Led 12-person cross-site team to ship containerised .NET/Camunda workflow; partner-bank onboarding dropped from six weeks to < two, accelerating new assets under management.

●Native AWS Bots: Swapped a seven-figure third-party bot platform for Lambda-driven automation, projecting mid-six-figure yearly savings while cutting back-office cycle time.

●Developer Velocity Fix: Retired a buggy code-generator that slowed teams; sprint throughput rebounded 30 %, deadlines met, morale restored.

●Secure-by-Pipeline: SonarQube and container-scan gates block risky builds; zero SOX or FINRA findings since roll-out.

Vice President, Technology (DevOps & Release Engineering) Aug 2015 - Dec 2020

●CI/CD Foundation: Introduced TeamCity, SonarQube, and Octopus; 100 + apps moved from manual builds to push-button deploys, shrinking release lead-time from 6 weeks to < 1 day.

●Release-on-Demand: Authored a risk-based policy (unit-test coverage, app criticality) that lets low-risk services self-release; cut release queues 85 % without raising audit flags.

●Culture Shift: Demonstrated that automation lightened change-control workload, turning skeptics into advocates and winning NC Tech award recognition.

●Portfolio Visibility: Rolled out Jira enterprise-wide, giving execs real-time burn-down and defect trend data for better forecasting.

Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead Oct 2012 – Aug 2015

●Authentication Modernisation: Re-architected legacy TACACS auth with C# service; zero auth failures, new MFA support, and no changes required in 50 + dependent apps.

●Trading Latency Cut: Tuned COM and .NET components to shave 15 % off order-routing time, protecting trades from price drift.

●Self-Service API Library: Built data-driven wrapper for 200 + proprietary BLServer calls; new message types now delivered in hours instead of a week.

●Talent Pipeline: Mentored near-shore juniors to full SDE status inside a year, adding capacity without extra headcount.

CONSULTING & EARLIER CAREER

●Mainframe-to-Unix Evolution: Moved insurance and utility workloads from assembler/CICS to C-and-Unix services, learning first-principles performance tuning that now guides low-latency cloud designs.

●Wireless Telemetry Network: In Edison’s R&D group, wrote C services for a pre-internet wireless grid—early exposure to event streams and high-availability design.

●Rapid-Engagement Contractor: Delivered production features in < 90 days across 10 + clients, honing the fast-context-switch skills later used to stand up new platform teams.

●Early Leadership: Managed mainframe systems-programming staff, laying the coaching foundation that later scaled DevOps transformations.

EDUCATION & CERTIFICATIONS *

●Bachelor of Science, Business Management — University of Phoenix

●AWS Solutions Architect – Professional — Amazon Web Services

●AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional — Amazon Web Services

●AWS Developer & SysOps Administrator – Associate — Amazon Web Services

●PCAP – Certified Associate Python Programmer — Python Institute

*Digital verification links for all credentials are available on request.

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