About Eric

Safety-Critical Systems & AI-Augmented Engineering

The Short Version

I am a Senior Software Engineer at Amazon, on a platform team whose mandate is to be a force multiplier for service teams. I joined in June 2022 and built a monitoring lifecycle platform that onboarded more than 2,750 application stages and brought 3 million monitors under standardized management, while hiring and mentoring eight new-to-industry engineers in New York. Since August 2024 I have owned that monitoring platform, which standardizes infrastructure monitoring across thousands of services, and architected the workflow orchestration control plane whose guardrails have run 500,000 safety checks for development teams in multiple global regions.

The part of that work I care most about is the safety layer. I designed guardrail validations for a pre-execution engine that runs concurrent checks before every automated operation: change control, regional isolation, monitoring readiness, pipeline health. I built a just-in-time composite monitoring system that aggregates alarm sources into ephemeral execution-scoped monitors, converting O(N) health polling to O(1), and an environment isolation guardrail that nobody can opt out of. An incorrect "yes" from a system like this is a production incident, so the system is built to earn every yes.

I also drove the platform's spec-driven AI strategy: a specification-as-code system as the single source of truth, and a hub-and-spoke setup where specialist coding agents inherit a curated slice of context instead of the whole corpus. The bet is that context architecture beats documentation dumps. So far it has held.

Before Amazon I spent nine years at Prudential Financial, working up from Tier 3 help desk to Senior Remote Access SRE and keeping VPN and MFA quiet for 60,000 corporate users. Nights and weekends I build in the open: a finance reviewer where the model narrates numbers it never derives, an open-source RAG system engineered to refuse when it should, a C++ pricing engine, and the visualizations on this site. The blog is where I write honestly about how all of it goes.

The Work, in Two Chapters

Fifteen years, one throughline: infrastructure other engineers depend on, made safe enough to automate.

At Amazon: Platform Engineering

  • Own the monitoring platform that standardizes infrastructure monitoring across thousands of Amazon services, a force-multiplier mandate for service teams across the org
  • Built the workflow orchestration control plane serving development teams across multiple global regions, enforcing safety-adherent workflows at Amazon's reliability bar
  • Keep that platform safe with a pre-execution guardrail engine: concurrent change-control, regional-isolation, monitoring-readiness, and pipeline-health checks gating every automated operation
  • Designed JIT composite monitoring that converts O(N) health polling to O(1), plus automated rollback that discovers deployment health signals from environment configuration
  • Drove an org-wide specification-as-code system and hub-and-spoke multi-agent AI setup, scaling AI-augmented development across the platform

At Prudential Financial (Remote Access SRE)

  • Enterprise monitoring standardization: 400,000+ monitors, migration from legacy stacks
  • Real-time VPN security tool scanning every global endpoint for high-risk sessions, used by ICC, help desk, and operations teams for on-demand session termination
  • QR Code MFA enrollment portal: eliminated help-desk-mediated provisioning across all enterprise help desks
  • RSA Self Service Portal + Mobile App: full platform ownership
  • Sole technical owner of all financial reporting and accounting delivery during COVID-19

Org-Wide Impact

Design safety guardrails that enforce monitoring, rollback, and change control before every automated infrastructure operation

Architect specification-driven AI systems where specialist agents inherit curated context from a central hub

Build composite monitoring systems that convert O(N) health polling to O(1) for safety-critical execution paths

Drive platform safety standards across a multi-service platform spanning Control Plane, Data Plane, and cross-cutting layers

Pioneer context architecture patterns that partition what AI agents see, preventing overload while maintaining full platform understanding

Mission

Build the systems other engineers depend on. Write honestly about how it goes. Outside of engineering: a dad, a marathoner, and a constant reader on AI and distributed systems.

Core Values

Safety is not a tax on velocity
Structure before code
Scale is the evidence
Earned lessons only

Key Skills

Distributed Systems
Workflow Orchestration
Control Plane Safety
Safety-Critical Systems
Automated Rollback & Monitoring
Python
Java
TypeScript / CDK
AWS (CloudWatch, DynamoDB, Lambda, ECS, S3)
Infrastructure as Code
AI-Augmented Development
Specification-Driven Development
Multi-Agent AI Systems
System Design
Platform Engineering
Reliability Engineering
Mentorship & Leadership