Staff Software Engineer · Forward Deployed Engineer · Data & AI · Atlanta
I build software with the people who have to use it.
I'm a Staff-level software engineer and forward deployed engineer with 13 years across data infrastructure, distributed systems, federal software, and applied AI. I work directly with the people using the system, turn ambiguous requirements into a build plan, and own the deployment.
At RenderATL, I worked across sales, marketing, and engineering. I closed $224,500 across 11 accounts in 15 weeks while serving as the sole engineer on the six-application platform those customers bought.
01Selected work
A few examples, from federal data systems to customer-facing products.
PTSO — ontology-governed multi-agent system
An orchestrator and three specialist agents exchanged data over MCP and A2A but still returned confident, wrong answers. I fixed the coordination problem with an ontology that defines vocabulary, constraints, provenance, staleness, and refusal. Each conclusion carries the rule that produced it, and latency dropped from roughly 20–40 seconds to about 6.
Live demo · Python · MCP · A2A · Google ADK · Neo4j · evidence graph
Space Force Unified Data Library connector
Primary engineer on a connector that streams U.S. and allied sensor data into the Space Force Unified Data Library. Delivered under an Air Force Research Laboratory Phase II award; the work contributed to Meroxa's selection for a $900M IDIQ vendor pool.
Go · Conduit · real-time streaming · ITAR/EAR
Nuclear Suppliers Group Information Sharing System
Established the web stack foundation for a secure multilateral platform now used by the 48 Participating Governments of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Named recipient of the National Nuclear Security Administration's Recognition of Excellence in Support of the Nonproliferation Mission.
NNSA / U.S. Department of Energy · multilateral · accredited
S3 log-ingestion Lambda
Built an open-source log shipper around Lambda's 500 MB disk, 2 GB RAM, and 15-minute limits. The streaming design processed a 350 MB compressed file containing several million lines without loading it into memory. I presented the work at AWS re:Invent.
Python · smart_open · asyncio · AWS Lambda · SAR
Air-gapped model inference for regulated data
Built an on-device distillation and inference pipeline for FERPA-protected student data. Each institution runs its own local model, and a server-side SQL inspector blocks excluded columns before a query can run.
MLX QLoRA · Ollama · fail-closed architecture · FERPA
NBA Running Net Points
Built an ingestion pipeline and interactive tool for Dr. Justin Jacobs' sports-analytics practice. Standard net-points models estimate possessions from playing time; this one counts the actual possessions in play-by-play data and plots every player's running total across a game.
Python · Pandas · Flask · Postgres · AWS Lambda · Redis
LLM evaluation frameworks
Created an eight-dimension LLM evaluation framework that became the team standard across repositories. I also built an RLHF quality layer with gold and honeypot tasks, inter-annotator agreement, measured trust tiers, and model-graded review of contested items.
evaluation · observability · cost & latency instrumentation
RenderATL sponsorship pipeline
Built a sales agent that finds and scores sponsorship prospects, then queues one lead at a time for review. Policy checks block off-brand language, model calls have batch-level cost caps, and no outreach leaves the system without human approval.
TypeScript · Next.js · Anthropic API · guardrails
Conference streaming & session RSVP
Built the gated streaming product at watch.renderatl.com for a 10,000-attendee conference, including ticket entitlements, authentication, playback, and the viewing experience. I also built session RSVP with capacity limits and waitlists. Both ran under live event load.
Next.js · Mux · Clerk · Postgres · entitlements
RenderATL Rush
Built a browser game to drive conference awareness and ticket sales. The game used locked leaderboard updates, share-to-unlock rewards, and single-use purchase codes. It generated $7,012.50 in attributed ticket revenue across 11 sales, with a 29.7% code-redemption rate.
Phaser 4 · React · Postgres · conversion instrumentation
02Talks & workshops
Selected talks and workshops. Recorded sessions are linked below. See the full media kit →
- 2026RenderATL — The Put That Sh*t On Agent: Building Multi-Agent AI Systems That Actually Talk to Each Other — why better models did not fix the problem, and what an ontology contract did (live demo)
- 2026/dev/color MLPD Series — Vibe Coding with Guardrails: Rebuilding MajorKey with Claude Code recorded
- 2026Atlanta Cloud + AI Conference — AI agents for open-source maintenance
- 2025Atlanta Developers' Conference — Beyond APIs: Building Interoperable AI Systems with MCP and A2A Protocols
- 2025GoWest — Real-time streaming data with Conduit
- 2025BlackTIDES Data · bidWeek — MCP and A2A workshop recorded
- 2024BITCON — AI workshop: LangChain, RAG, and AI agents (2024 & 2025)
- 2025Stats On Stats — AI, software engineering, and the future of tech — with a live RAG demo over NBA statistics recorded
- 2024The Bean Path — Using AI Agent Workflows to Create Your Personal Research Team — multi-agent orchestration and retrieval-augmented generation recorded
- 2022MagnoliaJS · RenderATL (2021) — You Can Get with
thisor You Can Get With That: Global State Management in React recorded - 2020AWS re:Invent — How the Sausage is Made: using Lambda to send S3 logs to New Relic recorded
- 2020LeadDev — Minimizing risks in code deployment (panel) recorded
- 2019ACM Richard Tapia Conference — Four accepted sessions across 2017, 2019 and 2020, including the peer-reviewed technical panel "Wakanda Name You Got" (10 of 24 accepted)
- 2019Strata Data Conference, O'Reilly / Cloudera — Evaluating company cultures recorded
- 2017/dev/color in Motion — Moderator, Jeff Dean breakout session
The Will Test
I created this nine-factor framework to help underrepresented engineers judge whether a company can support them. It gives candidates, employees, and leaders a concrete counterpart to Joel Spolsky's Joel Test. I delivered it at five venues between 2019 and 2020.
03Writing
Selected technical writing and published frameworks. Where a Meroxa article is no longer live, the link points to the Internet Archive.
- The Will Test — judging how diverse engineering teams are
My original nine-factor framework for evaluating whether an engineering culture can support underrepresented talent.
- Choosing a global state management strategy for your React app
A practical decision framework for matching React state-management tools to an application's actual scope and constraints.
- Government IT Modernization: Accelerate Your Digital Transformation
A guide for federal, state, and local teams dealing with legacy systems, siloed data, security requirements, and limited modernization budgets.
- Building Streaming Data Connectors Faster with OpenAI's GPT-4
What happened when I used GPT-4 to generate Go connectors and unit tests against the Conduit SDK, including where prompts and model context broke down.
- Conduit Accredited in Iron Bank, the DoD Centralized Artifacts Repository
How we took an open-source streaming platform through DoD container accreditation in under a week.
- Simplifying Data Integration: the Conduit SDK and Connector Template
- Spire Maritime AIS Source Data Integration now Generally Available
04Teaching
Ten years designing and teaching technical curriculum. Ten public repositories at github.com/William-Hill.
RenderATL University, "From Vibe Coding to AI Engineering" (2026). I developed the full 34-document curriculum and taught three evening workshops on specs, custom AI workflows, and the guardrails that keep coding agents honest. The series drew 164 registrations, and the first workshop filled to a waitlist.
"Three Tuesday nights. Three workshops. One quiet shift in how I build… I left after each workshop and immediately applied what I learned to refine the platforms I'd been working on."
Oneisha Freeman Rojales · AI & Social Impact Leader
University of the Virgin Islands (2017–2019). I returned as a paid summer instructor for three years, taught on both campuses, and wrote a new curriculum each year. A character-level text generation project from the course later became an accepted technical panel at the ACM Tapia Conference. UVI also invited me to join the faculty as an online adjunct.
Earlier teaching: Senior Adjunct Instructor at Hackbright Academy (2015–2017), session leader and curriculum designer for the Hidden Genius Project, and volunteer instructor with Black Girls Code and the Kapor Center.
I also founded the Sherry Hill Academic Achievement Scholarship for minority engineering students at Mississippi State. I earned my B.S. and M.S. in computer science there and was inducted into the Bagley College of Engineering Student Hall of Fame.
05Contact
Let's talk.
I'm open to Staff software engineering, forward deployed engineering, applied AI, and data platform roles. I also speak and teach on agent systems, evaluation, regulated deployments, and engineering with coding agents.