Ken Smith

I’m a Principal Cloud, Platform, and AI Engineer with 15+ years of experience building, operating, and scaling reliable, secure, and intelligent systems across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments. My career spans Platform Engineering, SRE, DevOps, Cloud Infrastructure, Software Engineering, and AI/ML systems, with a consistent focus on automation, reliability, and developer velocity. I specialize in designing internal platforms and production-grade cloud architectures that abstract complexity for engineering teams while enforcing security, compliance, and operational excellence. I’ve led and implemented Kubernetes-based platforms, GitOps-driven CI/CD, Terraform-powered multi-cloud infrastructure, and full-stack observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry) to deliver systems that are scalable, self-healing, and measurable by SLOs and business outcomes. From an SRE and DevOps perspective, I bring a strong reliability mindset—reducing MTTR, improving deployment safety, and standardizing operational practices across teams. I’ve built high-availability CI/CD pipelines, automated security and compliance checks, implemented incident response and monitoring frameworks, and partnered closely with software, data, and security teams to ship resilient systems at scale. In AI/ML and MLOps, I design and deploy end-to-end ML platforms supporting data ingestion, feature engineering, training, validation, deployment, and monitoring. My experience includes model serving on Kubernetes, AWS SageMaker, Airflow, MLflow, PyTorch/TensorFlow, and real-time and batch inference pipelines, with a strong emphasis on reproducibility, observability, and performance. I bridge the gap between ML research and production by applying proven software and platform engineering principles to AI systems. I also bring a deep software engineering foundation, having built backend services, APIs, and data pipelines for regulated industries, optimized application performance, and enabled secure, automated delivery workflows. Earlier in my career, I engineered real-time telemetry and control systems, shaping my systems-level thinking and reliability-first approach. Beyond hands-on engineering, I’ve worked in consulting, leadership, and training roles—architecting enterprise solutions, mentoring engineers, and teaching cloud, DevOps, and AI engineering with a strong real-world focus. What drives me: building platforms and intelligent systems that scale teams—not just infrastructure—turning complexity into leverage and reliability into a competitive advantage.