Covetrus, Inc. — Staff / Principal AI Data Engineer
Jul 2021 – PresentPortland, ME (Remote)
Promoted through Senior and Lead to Staff/Principal. Architected the enterprise data lakehouse and AI inference platform, ingesting 50TB+ weekly across CRM, ERP, PIMS, and operational healthcare systems.
Production LLM Stack — Healthcare Intelligence Platform
- Architected a GPU-clustered LLM inference stack: 5 production inference pipelines, 2 continuous fine-tuning loops, and 2 automated eval gates serving millions of patient records.
- Taxonomy Classification: 3-stage Gemma-4-E4B-it pipeline with FAISS-GPU + EmbeddingGemma-300M MMR vector search (λ=0.9), structured breed/species classification with per-match QA scoring. Supports multi-breed resolution (e.g., “Labrador Poodle mix” → 2 matches) with intelligent retry logic (soft/hard caps).
- Gender Normalization: Deployed Gemma-4-E4B-it via vLLM to standardize raw descriptions into 7 clinical categories with plausibility scoring, including domain rules (gelding → Male Neutered horse, barrow → Male Neutered pig).
- Transcription & SOAP QA: Operationalized Gemma-4-31B-IT-QAT-W4A16 via Ray + vLLM for clinical transcript evaluation (quality, plausibility, completeness) and SOAP summary faithfulness scoring with hallucination/omission/medication error detection.
- MLOps & Eval Gates: Closed-loop fine-tuning where candidate models are evaluated on holdout accuracy against production; promoted via MLflow alias only on statistically significant improvement. Orchestrated via dbt Python models on L40S GPU clusters with Unity Catalog governance.
Enterprise Data Lakehouse & Architecture
- Architected the enterprise data lakehouse on AWS (S3, Lambda, EMR, EKS) using Databricks and Snowflake, ingesting 50TB+ weekly from CRM, ERP, PIMS, and HR systems into columnar and relational stores.
- Pioneered Data Contracts and schema evolution protocols with automated quality, anomaly detection, and lineage tracking ensuring 100% integrity for executive reporting.
- Designed SCD Type 2 semantic models in dbt/Snowflake managing 15+ years of historical KPIs; conducted Level-of-Detail (LOD) analysis in Python to isolate revenue drivers and longitudinal trends.
- Built star schemas and semantic models reducing transformation runtimes by 40% and accelerating financial/operational reporting for enterprise stakeholders.
Event-Driven Streaming & Real-Time Analytics
- Designed config-based streaming infrastructure over Apache Kafka and Spring Cloud Data Flow, processing millions of events per second with sub-second latency. Eliminated point-to-point connections, cutting infrastructure costs by 5%.
- Architected an end-to-end streaming control plane using Kafka, Redis, Snowflake, and Python/Java microservices for real-time predictive scoring achieving 92% accuracy; integrated automated health alerting via Splunk/CloudWatch.
Integrations, Security & Observability
- Built resilient CDC connectors for Salesforce and NetSuite via OAuth 2.0 with least-privilege IAM governance, improving real-time data accuracy by 25%.
- Established enterprise observability with CloudWatch, Splunk, and custom validation frameworks, reducing data drift and service errors by 50% and maintaining 99.9%+ availability.
Platform Engineering & DevOps
- Automated cloud provisioning via Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, and GitHub Actions, establishing GitOps CI/CD that reduced deployment times by 60%.
- Standardized microservice containerization enabling rapid, iterative AI feature deployment across distributed teams.