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Expand Up @@ -8,63 +8,53 @@ Theodore Cowan
:Address: Salem, Massachusetts


Building SaaS products on AWS is my core power. My professional identity is rooted in a love for helping others and deriving satisfaction from empowering myself and others to be excellent builders. I am a results-driven professional with a strong entrepreneurial spirit and an unwavering commitment to advancing business objectives. I am expertly skilled in public cloud architecture, product architecture, product delivery, and streaming data engineering within Software-as-a-Service.
Senior Principal Software Engineer focused on designing and building AI-powered SaaS products. I combine hands-on full-stack engineering with system architecture, AI research, and business exploration, taking products from early concepts through launch and continued development.

I am a passionate free software advocate with a keen interest in AI and an active contributor to the community. I am proficient in Python, TypeScript, and Golang, and I am certified (EMCCAe) as a Cloud Architect.
I find particular satisfaction in system design: turning product needs into cohesive applications, services, and data flows. My work spans AI applications, backend services, frontend experiences, cloud infrastructure, checkout and billing, product experimentation, and conversion measurement. I bring an experiment-driven approach to feature delivery and connect engineering decisions to product and business objectives.

Areas of Expertise: AWS, Software Development, Cloud Architecture, DevOps, Infrastructure-as-Code, Streaming Data Engineering, SaaS, Strategic Planning, Business Development, Free Software, Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models.
I am proficient in Python, TypeScript, and Go, certified (EMCCAe) as a Cloud Architect, and a passionate free software advocate who values mentoring and helping others become excellent builders.

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AWS Experience
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I have over 12 years of experience in AWS, specializing in Platform Operations, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Migrations, Cost Optimization, DevOps, Software Engineering, Data Engineering, and Machine Learning. I am a strong proponent of leveraging cloud-native solutions, preferring managed services over self-hosted options, serverless architectures over provisioned infrastructure, and buying over building when appropriate.

Key Areas of Expertise
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Cloud Architecture: Design and implement scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud architectures.
Cloud Migrations: Lead and execute complex migrations to AWS, ensuring minimal disruption.
Cost Optimization: Develop strategies to reduce AWS costs through resource monitoring and tradeoff analysis.
DevOps: Implement CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and automated deployment processes.
Data Engineering: Build and manage streaming data pipelines, data lakes, and analytics solutions.
Machine Learning: Train and deploy machine learning models using AWS services.
Engineering Capabilities
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- System Design & Architecture: Design SaaS applications, service boundaries, integrations, and data flows using event-driven architecture and Domain-Driven Design.
- AI Application Engineering: Integrate foundation models, orchestrate stateful agents, engineer context, and develop prompts and evaluation workflows incorporating human annotations.
- Full-Stack Product Development: Build backend services, APIs, and customer-facing web applications.
- SaaS Commerce: Implement checkout, subscriptions, billing, and customer onboarding.
- Product Analytics & Experimentation: Instrument user behavior, support feature experiments, and deliver controlled releases.
- Data Engineering & Conversion Measurement: Build streaming pipelines, analytics integrations, and conversion-tracking systems supporting customer acquisition.
- Cloud Engineering & Delivery: Design managed and serverless infrastructure, automate deployments with infrastructure as code and CI/CD, and support observability and cost optimization.

AWS Services Proficiencies
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Cloud Architecture
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Compute: EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS
Storage & Databases: S3, EFS, DynamoDB, RDS, Aurora, Neptune
Networking: VPC, Route 53, Direct Connect, CloudFront
Security & Identity: IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, Cognito
Analytics & Data Processing: Athena, Glue, Redshift, DataFirehose
Machine Learning: SageMaker, Comprehend, Rekognition
Application Integration: SNS, SQS, Step Functions, EventBridge
Management & Monitoring: CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Systems Manager, X-Ray

Tooling
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Infrastructure as Code: aws-cdk, CloudFormation, Terraform
Configuration Management: Helm, cdk8s, SaltStack
CI/CD: GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, TeamCity
SDKs and Libraries: boto3
I have over 12 years of experience building on AWS across software engineering, data engineering, platform operations, cloud migrations, and machine learning. I favor managed services and serverless architectures, building differentiating capabilities and buying established solutions when appropriate.

Work Experience
===============

Guvnor AI
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Flagship Lab 105, Inc
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:Title: Senior Principal Software Engineer
:Period: October 2024 - Present

:Title: Creator
:Location: Salem Massachusetts
:Period: December 2023 - Present
Develop IrisChat through AI research, business exploration, system architecture, and hands-on full-stack engineering. Built and launched the AI SaaS product in November 2025 and continue delivering features through an experiment-driven release process.

I developed a chatbot with streaming responses entirely on AWS serverless infrastructure. The goal of Guvnor is to demonstrate personalization and long-term memory by populating and querying a knowledge graph as a RAG method. Guvnor is my personal playground for experimenting with AI and large language models.
- Conduct AI research and explore business opportunities for AI-powered SaaS products.
- Conceived and designed a graph-based memory system for IrisChat to support long-term conversational memory.
- Develop conversational AI workflows and context engineering, integrating foundation models and stateful agent orchestration.
- Designed a context-aware scheduling system that enables IrisChat to initiate future interactions from explicit user requests or inferred needs, then evaluate whether to respond, reschedule, or skip when triggered.
- Integrate IrisChat with iMessage, RCS, and SMS.
- Develop prompts and LLM evaluation workflows incorporating human annotations.
- Implement product instrumentation, behavioral analytics, and controlled feature releases to support continuous experimentation.
- Build customer-facing web experiences with React and implement checkout and subscription billing with Stripe.
- Implement data pipelines and conversion-tracking integrations supporting Meta and TikTok marketing campaigns.
- Design and build managed and serverless AWS infrastructure using infrastructure as code.

- Python, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Large Language Models, Llama Index, LangChain, AWS API Gateway, aws-cdk, Neo4j, Github Actions
- Selected technologies: Python, TypeScript, React, AWS CDK, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, LangChain, LangGraph, Stripe, Amplitude, LaunchDarkly

Hosta AI
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