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Hands-on engineering leader and player-coach with 20+ years of experience building and scaling teams that ship enterprise applications and multi-tenant SaaS platforms, from Angel round through Series D. Specialized in AWS cloud infrastructure and driving AI-native, agentic development that increases engineering throughput and quality. Experience across public-sector/federal, healthcare, and adtech—modernizing architecture, advancing technical strategy, and delivering scalable engineering execution. Leads high-performing, autonomous cultures; coaches teams; and partners with product and executives to turn roadmap and OKRs into measurable outcomes.…Hands-on engineering leader and player-coach with 20+ years of experience building and scaling teams that ship enterprise applications and multi-tenant SaaS platforms, from Angel round through Series D. Specialized in AWS cloud infrastructure and driving AI-native, agentic development that increases engineering throughput and quality. Experience across public-sector/federal, healthcare, and adtech—modernizing architecture, advancing technical strategy, and delivering scalable engineering execution. Leads high-performing, autonomous cultures; coaches teams; and partners with product and executives to turn roadmap and OKRs into measurable outcomes.

RAFFY KALOUSTIAN

Software Engineer, DevOps Developer, AI Engineer, +1

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Hands-on engineering leader and player-coach with 20+ years of experience building and scaling teams that ship enterprise applications and multi-tenant SaaS platforms, from Angel round through Series D. Specialized in AWS cloud infrastructure and driving AI-native, agentic development that increases engineering throughput and quality. Experience across public-sector/federal, healthcare, and adtech—modernizing architecture, advancing technical strategy, and delivering scalable engineering execution. Leads high-performing, autonomous cultures; coaches teams; and partners with product and executives to turn roadmap and OKRs into measurable outcomes.…Hands-on engineering leader and player-coach with 20+ years of experience building and scaling teams that ship enterprise applications and multi-tenant SaaS platforms, from Angel round through Series D. Specialized in AWS cloud infrastructure and driving AI-native, agentic development that increases engineering throughput and quality. Experience across public-sector/federal, healthcare, and adtech—modernizing architecture, advancing technical strategy, and delivering scalable engineering execution. Leads high-performing, autonomous cultures; coaches teams; and partners with product and executives to turn roadmap and OKRs into measurable outcomes.

Available to hire

Hands-on engineering leader and player-coach with 20+ years of experience building and scaling teams that ship enterprise applications and multi-tenant SaaS platforms, from Angel round through Series D. Specialized in AWS cloud infrastructure and driving AI-native, agentic development that increases engineering throughput and quality.

Experience across public-sector/federal, healthcare, and adtech—modernizing architecture, advancing technical strategy, and delivering scalable engineering execution. Leads high-performing, autonomous cultures; coaches teams; and partners with product and executives to turn roadmap and OKRs into measurable outcomes.

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Work Experience

AI Development Consultant at Self-Employed

January 1, 2026 - Present

Refined a Claude-code-driven agentic development practice to deliver an approximately 5× product productivity force multiplier across full-stack, native apps, and infrastructure. Architected and built a native iOS consumer app for an early-stage cosmetic and beauty collector market (beta). Built product using Swift/SwiftUI and ConveX DB; implemented privacy-preserving edge image processing using Cloudflare Workers (WASM via Cloudflare). EXIF metadata stripping (GPS, timestamps, device info) from iOS HEIC uploads streamed to Cloudflare R2. Advised on AI-enabled prototyping by coaching product managers on agentic ideation and PRD-style prompting with rapid cross-functional communication across product, design, and engineering.

Senior Engineering Manager at Veritone

June 1, 2025 - December 31, 2025

Led engineering for Veritone’s Public Sector vertical: four teams (full-stack, QA, custom ML/model training, and DevOps) across the US and off-shore/UK, delivering government contracts. Partnered with public sector product to translate requirements into architecture, security, and scale specs; sequenced and distributed feature work across full-stack, ML, and DevOps. Delivered three major releases in Q3–Q4. Drove AI-assisted and agentic development adoption—grew AI agent usage from ~10% to ~40% of engineers and coached teams with agentic workflows. Built agentic code-review workflows into CI (GitHub Copilot and CodeRabbit) and standardized feedback loops. Hands-on built a Node.js worker queue service to proxy and preprocess live image streams for real-time incident-scene review.

Head of Engineering at Hello Wonder

April 1, 2024 - April 30, 2025

Led engineering under the CEO for an AI-powered native and browser companion app for children. Turned around a stalled product and delivered a fully functional public beta within the first 90 days after a year-long delay. Architected and built native iOS (Swift/SwiftUI) and web (Vue.js) clients on a Convex database and AWS infrastructure (Lambda, DynamoDB, ECS). Built in-app assistant using OpenAI models with tool-calling and context-aware intelligence (session history, parental settings, age, interests) plus a RAG pipeline with vector embeddings and semantic search over children’s content. Engineered child-safety controls: role-based access/permissions and parental filtering with hard limits on assistant topics/content and real-time parental gating for sensitive interactions. Drove ~75% daily adoption of AI-assisted development across the team; recruited and mentored engineers and DevOps; iterated via Mixpanel analytics; positioned for public release and initial VC round; later acqu

Senior Director of Engineering at Perygon Health 360

March 1, 2023 - April 30, 2024

Led full-stack engineering team and hands-on ownership of AWS infrastructure and DevOps for HIPAA-regulated online pharmacy delivering IoT medication-dispensing and vitals-tracking devices. Rebuilt the AWS footprint from the ground up: established an AWS organization via Control Tower (segregated dev/QA/prod, IoT, legacy pharmacy, and hardware accounts) with aggregated billing/reporting and SSO via IAM Identity Center, provisioned as IaC with AWS CDK (TypeScript). Replaced a vertically-scaled EC2 monolith with a distributed service-oriented architecture, extracting worker and fulfillment services behind a work queue and event pub/sub while retaining the monolith as the API layer. Cut monthly infrastructure costs by over 40% by migrating dev/QA/prod from EC2 + RDS + MySQL to Lambda/Cloudflare Workers, EKS, and Aurora Serverless v2 with Dockerized deployments and a custom CI/CD pipeline using CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy. Optimized an IoT device edge layer (A/B testing Lambda@

VP Engineering at Simple Therapy

November 1, 2020 - October 31, 2022

Led engineering for a HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform delivering musculoskeletal (MSK) and behavioral health. Directed three remote teams (full-stack, QA, and native iOS/Android) and owned DevOps and infrastructure. Drove ~35% increase in signup adoption by architecting real-time video therapy session experience and patient/therapist scheduling service. Advanced an AWS-driven multi-tenant telehealth platform across web and native iOS/Android apps serving enterprise employers, health plans, and hospital systems (including MAXIS Global Benefits Network, Community Care Health, and ChristianCare). Replaced AWS Cognito with Auth0 enabling SAML 2.0 SSO, multi-tenant configurations, and role-based access control for enterprise partners. Decoupled an EC2-based monolith into event-driven, serverless systems (container-based Lambda and ECS), reducing large EC2 instances for ~20% annual savings.

Senior Software Architect at Adobe

September 1, 2018 - October 1, 2020

Hands-on architect (IC) reporting to Director of Product & Engineering; owned backend architecture for Adobe Advertising Creative suite (dynamic, personalized ad-variation templates), partnering with backend and client-side teams. Co-architected a server-side universal configuration system as a single source of truth for UI assets, stylesheets, and fonts enabling homogeneous, config-driven rebuilds of client-side web interfaces. Designed and prototyped a Java-based SOA exposing secure Swagger-designed JSON APIs used by config-driven applications to support rendering and interactive feature functionality. Built with Java (Spring, Hibernate, Gradle), Elasticsearch, MySQL, and DynamoDB; deployed across environments with Terraform, Jenkins, Kubernetes, and Docker; documented architecture via UML and specs.

Chief Architect at ThinkHR

January 1, 2017 - November 1, 2018

Senior backend engineers for the CTO at a B2B2C HR-compliance SaaS for white-labeled insurance brokers, PEOs, and payroll providers. Partnered with VP of Engineering across full-stack and platform teams. Re-architected an Employee Handbook Builder initiative built over a year to aggregate legal, company-policy, regulatory, and HR requirements into compliant employee handbooks for clients across all 50 states. Redesigning AWS infrastructure by separating dev/QA/prod accounts and building CI/CD pipelines (CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy), cutting AWS annual costs by ~15%. Designed and implemented enterprise SSO (OAuth 2.0, SAML 2.0) across the new SaaS platform and legacy systems.

CTO / VP Engineering at This moment

June 1, 2014 - January 1, 2017

Promoted from Chief Architect to VP of Engineering and then CTO after leading the rebuild of the flagship product into a multi-tenant SaaS, scaling an engineering org to ~50 people (DevOps, client-side, server-side, QA). Re-architected a single-tenant system into a multi-tenant SaaS content-marketing cloud for enterprise brands and agencies (Coca-Cola, Sephora, Levi’s, Salesforce, Frito-Lay, Intuit) to source, curate, and distribute brand and user-generated content across web, social, email, and mobile. Cut AWS spend by ~85% ($220K to under $30K/month) by consolidating shared multi-tenant infrastructure (databases, ingestion/delivery pipelines, fewer EC2 instances). Modernized delivery with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD. Led enterprise security reviews and RFQ/RFP responses for regulated financial clients (Wells Fargo, AIG, Bank of America) via RFPIO. Instituted SDLC rigor—architecture reviews, TDD, and high availability.