Resume
Daniel Plas Rivera — Lead Software Engineer, AI/ML & LLM Platforms. Lead Software Architect at McKinsey & Company, New York; 15+ years shipping production systems. Looking toward LLM infrastructure, agent tooling, model evaluation, and reinforcement learning roles.
AI/ML & LLM Platform Engineering
Lead architect for GenAI/LLM products across 25+ teams, owning AI systems end to end. Built a Model Context Protocol server exposing 75+ agent tools behind a tool-RAG discovery layer, with sandboxed code execution and confirm-guarded destructive ops. Architected a multi-provider LLM gateway (Anthropic, OpenAI/Azure, Google/Vertex, Bedrock) with SSE token streaming and provider-native citation grounding, plus a vision-LLM document-intelligence pipeline with page-anchored citations. Fine-tuned a hierarchical DeBERTa classifier over a 4-level, 137-path taxonomy — deepest-level accuracy 4% → 77%+ via focal loss and branch oversampling — with CI-triggered SageMaker training and ECS Fargate serving. ~120-endpoint FastAPI gateway; React 19/TypeScript front end with streaming chat and click-to-source citations; offline eval harnesses with automated hallucination scoring.
Data Engineering at Scale
Re-architected a Slack analytics platform from 16.5M polled API calls/day to event streaming on Kinesis: sub-million daily calls, 99.6% cost reduction ($47k/yr). Took 10+ Glue/Spark pipelines from 0% to 80% test coverage; closed 10+ critical security findings (fleet-wide IMDSv2, S3 CMK enforcement).
Applied ML Research — Reinforcement Learning & Imitation
A memorial AI that plays like a specific deceased player: VQ-BeT tokenized policy behavior-cloned from thousands of his recorded matches, fine-tuned with style-constrained PPO so 'plays like him' lives inside the objective. Perception: a 266-dim state vector reverse-engineered from arcade RAM. ~34 arXiv papers folded in, every claim adversarially verified — including two audit campaigns against my own training stack. The 2.2M-parameter policy now runs live in the browser via a hand-written forward pass, verified bit-close against the trained model.
Systems & Reverse Engineering
Multi-year program on 1998 arcade hardware — no source, no docs, encrypted program code. Custom emulator cores that break the 32MB graphics ceiling to 64MB (pixel-proven); a Dreamcast soundtrack running on the original QSound DSP via hand-assembled Z80; a commercial cabinet's netplay protocol recovered from ARM32 disassembly. Every claim terminates in a reproducible artifact.
- PwC
- 2019 — 2020
- Developer (Contract) — PwC Data Landscape — client-data security-risk analyzer; Django/Graphene/GraphQL backend for React SPA
- Capital One
- 2019
- Master Software Engineer (Contract) — re-architected the Credit Risk Rating Platform (probability-of-default microservices) powering credit-approval decisions
- Cox Automotive
- 2018 — 2019
- Sr. Python Full-Stack Engineer (Contract) — Finance & Insurance platform: Docker/CI-CD infrastructure, performance work via New Relic + Splunk
- PwC
- 2017 — 2018
- Developer (Contract) — VPN/security tech into the internal tax-audit platform on Azure; Docker-launched VPN containers
- Bank of America
- 2017
- Application Architect V (Contract) — target-state cloud architecture + platform roadmap; REST APIs, POCs and feasibility studies
- Columbia University
- 2016 — 2017
- Application Systems Developer — transitioned the university to a Python stack; REST APIs bridging legacy systems, OAuth/LTI integrations
- Thinkful
- 2015 — 2016
- Python & Web-Dev Mentor — mentored career-changers through project-based curriculum, weekly 1:1 code reviews
- Earlier era
- 2009 — 2015
- Full-stack lead & founder roles — Basics Plus (lead dev, POS-connected e-commerce), Work-Bench, Brainy Maps (founder), K.I.S. Foundation, NYC College of Technology lab technician
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
- Amazon Web Services
- Emerging Media Technologies
- New York City College of Technology
- Multimedia Programming & Design
- Borough of Manhattan Community College
- Emerging Media
- Hunter College
- Cisco Networking + CompTIA PC Repair
- School of Cooperative Technical Education
- AngelHack 2016 Manhattan — Grand Prize (Hackcelerator) + Best Use of AWS
- New York Minute: fastest/cheapest NYC routing across Uber + public transit (Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, Route 53, S3, Alexa, ArcGIS)
- Hack NYU 2014 — MVP Winner
- SudoLove: connecting participants, sponsors and mentors for global hackathons