Daniel Connery

AI, Comms, and Interceptor Drone Pilot - unit change to Engineering and Technical Regiment.

Artificial Intelligence, Electronic Warfare, Communications, and ISR Drone Pilot Advisor / Contributor to Ukrainian General Staff for encryption, communications, and electronic warfare.

Responsible for internal assessment and implementation of full-company tech strategy for all 156 technology categories across 25 games leveraging Epic Games’ products 216 times with an average project budget of $100M for an approximate total of $2.5 Billion portfolio valuation. Led bi-monthly meetings with Epic Games’ TAM to review, aggregate, and collaborate on Unreal Engine 5 engineering UDN tickets from all Tencent western games studios – about 16 AAA Unreal Engine 5 games. Led multinational C-Suite executives, product stake holders, and external parties to define and implement technology strategy, milestones, and Key Performance Indicators. Collaborated with financial division to assess at-risk facilities and provide technical and strategic solutions. Navigated a multi-cultural corporate environment to assist the identification of inefficiencies and participated in focused restructuring and reduce budget overhead by about $300MM Technical interface between 25+ Tencent western facilities, all external technology services providers, and 45+ internal technology services ranging from global infrastructure to developer tools to R&D. Evaluated all potential technical partners to maintain global competitive advantage. Designed, developed, and presented a Gen AI Unreal Engine 5 game (vertical slice) at GDC 2024 in collaboration with ConvAI. This vertical slice demonstrated a new game mechanic leveraging natural language processing conversational choices resulting from the NPCs without behavior trees.

Senior MLOps Architect at AWS’s Generative AI Innovation Center - position made redundant due to organizational change in classification.

AWS Game Tech Senior Solutions Architect with a focus on game build automation pipelines supporting 50+ game studios, publishers, or game-related independent software vendors (ISV) generating over $20MM in portfolio growth. Provided cloud architecture design support for AWS AI service teams’ MLOps offerings leveraging AWS Glue, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Athena and additional AWS services to increase lead generation for existing and new clients. Led AWS SA Council for multiple games initiatives and focus-areas contributing design, development, or internal testing for almost every AWS Game Tech service (internal customers) including GameSparks 2.0, GameLift, AWS Simspace Weaver, and several unannounced services. Created the Lean Unified Cloud-Integrated Extensible Network (LUCIEN) to align all AWS Game Tech services and external GPIC partners using Unreal Engine 5. LUCIEN is a global AWS Cloud WAN based solution optimized for security and both player and developer latency. 3+ years MVP development for AWS Simspace Weaver announced at AWS reInvent 2022.This Unreal Engine 5 game demonstrates real-time synchronization between game servers allowing for thousands of players and AI entities. Led AWS design teams for multiple initiatives including AWS ProServe pixel-streaming initiative commissioned by Epic Games. Provided both server-based and Serverless implementations of the Unreal Engine Pixel Streaming plugin matchmaking server, hardened security, and optimized jitter (lost frames) via Amazon Global Accelerator. Innovated internal organization workflows by creating multiple game tech feature matrices comparing all major cloud gaming services across LiveOps, Game Build Pipelines, Virtual Desktops, and more. This includes sub-contractor work directly for AWS at Triumph Tech and Avahi.

Provided AWS Game Tech engineering and Linux administration support for multiple game studios, from Digital Extremes to new indie studios leveraging Perforce, Amazon GameLift, Serverless backend (API Gateway, Lambdas, Dynamo, RDS), Cognito (authentication and authorization), AI dataset creation and model operationalization, and more. Amazon SageMaker DevOps engineer (now MLOps) creating automated CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, AWS CodeBuild & CodeDeploy) leveraging AWS Glue, Amazon SageMaker, and S3. Led Well Architected Reviews (WARs) of AWS environments for over 20 game studios incorporating all 5 AWS pillars. Leads Agile ceremonies including StandUp, Backlog Refinement, and Code Review sessions. Creates “brown-bag” training sessions, documentation, and training videos for new team-members. Wrote the Cloud Cost Optimization book (literally) for Southwest Airlines, including: All AWS FinOps tools usage, tagging, Cloudability 101, serverless cost optimization, and several automated scripts for FinOp management (CloudWatch Alarms, AutoOff, gamification bot)

Develops multiple cloud gaming projects, including unannounced projects, a UE4 demo leveraging multiple Epic MegaGrant recipients, and R&D support for Unreal Engine 4 Distributed Actor Technology (DAT). Projects implement multiple languages, such as Python, JavaScript (Node), C#, Java, C++. Provides AWS Game Tech engineering and support for multiple game studios, from AAA studios to new indies leveraging Amazon GameLift, Serverless backend (API Gateway, Lambdas, Dynamo, RDS, etc...), Unreal Engine 4/Unity/Lumberyard, Cognito (authentication and authorization), Twitch integration, and more. Conducts Well Architected Reviews (WARs) of AWS environments for game studios incorporating all 5 AWS pillars -from security hardening to disaster recovery to cost optimization - including serverless lens. Develops AWS Game Tech “quickstarts” and tutorials for Unreal Engine 4 and other major game engines, including UE4 plugins, whitepapers, and industry market research. Currently developing C++ UE4 Plugin for AWS API Gateway.

Java Developer for multiple systems across all environments and SDLC stages utilizing SNS, Step-Functions, Python Lambdas, S3, DynamoDB, SQS, Springboot 2 MVC, and aspects of machine-learning. Facilitated scrum and morning stand-up, leads “brown-bag” training sessions, creates documentation and training videos for new team-members, and active in peer code review sessions. Wrote the Cloud Cost Optimization book (literally) for a Fortune 100 company, including All AWS FinOps tools usage, tagging, Cloudability 101, serverless cost optimization, and several automated scripts for FinOp management (CloudWatch Alarms, AutoOff, gamification bot, etc.) Additional Technologies: GraphQL, Groovy, CloudFormation, Stacker, Runway, Jenkins CI/CD, Node.js, TypeScript

Led over 80 exceptional engineers across 5 programs using Microsoft Project and JIRA Portfolio (full Atlassian Suite). Managed and updated multi-program Jenkins server and plugins (SonarQube for static analysis). Maintained and updated Vagrant builds for development environments across multiple programs. Implemented multiple automation provisioning solutions, such as Ansible (legacy) and Docker-Compose. Evaluated and co-led implementation of multiple continuous integration solutions, such as Spinnaker and Gitlab-CI. Client Facing: Coordination-Across-Release-Trains (CART) Release Train Engineer for 13 client programs. Coordinated Amazon C2S (Top Secret AWS) requirements and decomposition directly between client and Amazon. Coordination of multiple server site upgrades and maintenance patches. (This time period also includes a sabbatical taken for my father who passed away. I don't mean to misrepresent my time at Lockheed Martin, but my LinkedIn timeline gets messy when returning)

Supported US Army Chief Information Officer / G6 (CIO/G6). Provided technical guidance for Army Software Marketplace, Army Knowledge Online transition, Unified Capability (UC) initiatives. Coordinated with multiple Programs of Executive Offices (PEO) from Aberdeen, Ft. Huachuca, to Ft Meade and MITRE. Provided technical insight directly to 4 GS-15 Government Employees in CIO/G6 Policy and Resources. Led Scrum Agile meetings reporting directly to Deputy Director of CIO/G6 for 3 systems serving over 1.5 million US Army users. Provided technical insight for Army Network Campaign near and midterm planning. Provided technical support for the Army Cloud initiative and coordinated with multi-service representatives. Assisted in developed of Global Enterprise Fabric prototype and proof of concept of Openstack cloud platform on a CISCO network.

Lead Amazon Web Service (AWS GovCloud) Architect for a US Navy contract requiring a combination of client’s legacy software and current virtualization stack (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Citrix XenApp, HBSS, WSUS). Designed and implemented end-to-end configuration management strategy utilizing existing systems and IBM Rational Suite. Led and mentored 12 junior analysts in application and business development. Designed and developed critical Business Intelligence (BI) applications; streamlined method for deriving and exporting quantifiable metrics from team management console; proposed and demonstrated various automated DevOps tools (Chef, Selenium, etc.); and selected as one of three initial design architects for a Request For Proposal (RFP) proposed system valued at $250MM.

Designs, develops, integrates and supports multiple GIS Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant OWF based web applications (widgets) and automated tests in an agile, test driven environment using Java/J2EE (GWT/GXT UI Toolkit), XML, CSS, HTML, Python and JavaScript/JSON. Incorporated back-end relational database management systems (RDBMS) using service oriented architecture (SOA) leveraging both SOAPful (standard and OGC compliant web processing services) and RESTful web services to interface with existing system architecture, such as: GeoServer, PostgreSQL, and custom product services. Utilized Agile/Scrum methodologies to interface with users and program management, led and conducted focus and usability testing, analyzed and revised complex system requirement user stories, and prepared documentation and training in accordance with programming and user-level requirements.

Assistant Operations Officer of an Expeditionary Signal Battalion assigned 832 Soldiers and 42 C4 systems valued at over $125MM; tasked to organize and equip to support voice, video, and data for Army and joint operations. Lead for several essential battalion programs such as the Unit Status Report (USR), the Organizational Inspection Program (OIP) and Operations Security (OPSEC). Executive Officer of a Headquarters and Headquarters Company composed of over 150 Soldiers and directly responsible for CO HQ of 30 Soldiers and responsible for maintenance, accountability, and serviceability of equipment valued at over $15MM. Spearheaded, developed, and debugged new software and created training material for Cadet Command’s enterprise online multi-media initiative. Responsibilities included quality assurance and full life cycle assessment.

Minor in Neuroscience

Joined September 11th 2001 Comissioned May 5th 2003