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Cloud & Product Engineering

STEPH SIMMONS

CLOUD & PLATFORM ENGINEER · AWS SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT

I build systems that hold up after launch - from AWS infrastructure and delivery pipelines to the product running on top of them.

Projects

Production systems, designed and shipped end-to-end.

Three independently engineered products spanning event-driven infrastructure, multi-tenant platforms, and serverless modernization - each with its architecture and trade-offs documented in code.

01 Personal Project

RabbitHole

An event-driven video platform where uploads trigger an AI-powered processing pipeline - transcoding, speech indexing, and semantic search across your entire library.

ECS FargateEventBridgeSQSffmpegClaude VisionAWS TranscribeTerraformReact
ECS Fargate over Lambda for transcoding - ffmpeg workloads are CPU-bound and long-running, and Lambda's 15-minute limit and cold starts would have killed the experience.
Case Study Under Construction GitHub
rabbithole.stephsimmons.dev
RabbitHole
02 Co-Founded · Proprietary

QuicLens

A multi-tenant research analytics SaaS for neurodegenerative disease labs - replacing manual R scripts and Excel with structured, cloud-native plate analysis and audit-ready records.

AWS CDKLambda (Docker)API GatewayDynamoDBWorkOS SSOAnthropic APITypeScript
Tenant authorization is explicit. WorkOS verifies identity; organization and lab membership, role checks, and resource-level access rules determine what each user can read or change.
143named backend pytest functions across 9 modules covering analysis, validation, classification, thresholds, and API integration
Case Study Live Demo Code Private
quiclens.stephsimmons.dev
QuicLens
03 Independent Rebuild

PureZen

A spa booking platform re-platformed across three infrastructure generations: AWS Academy on EC2/VPC/ALB, Vercel + Hetzner, and a final AWS serverless architecture built with Lambda, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront, DynamoDB, and CDK.

AWS CDKLambdaAPI GatewayDynamoDBS3 + CloudFrontAnthropic ClaudeFastAPI
Never answers from memory. Services resolve against the real catalog, availability comes from DynamoDB, and booking actions are deterministic state machines.
Case Study Live Demo GitHub
purezen.stephsimmons.dev
PureZen
About

A decade in enterprise IT. Five years building outside it, too.

Cloud Engineer and AWS Solutions Architect, shaped by a decade inside enterprise IT watching what happens after software ships - the incidents, the handoffs, the documentation nobody wrote, systems inherited by people who weren't there when they were built. That's the lens I bring to every system I design.

Systems that are observable, documented, supportable - built for whoever owns them after I'm gone.

Experience

2021–Present
Independent Engineer · Product & Infrastructure
RabbitHole · QuicLens · PureZen
Designing and shipping the products above end-to-end, alongside a full-time enterprise IT role - each deployed in its own AWS environment using infrastructure-as-code, automated delivery, and the same operational-readiness discipline I bring to enterprise IT.
2015–Present
IS Supervisor · Scrum Master
Mutual of Omaha · Omaha, NE
Progressed from Senior Service Desk Analyst through Business Systems Consultant and Technical Lead to IS Supervisor - now leading a 24-person enterprise IT team as a technical escalation point, coordinating platform changes across engineering, infrastructure, identity, and security.
Credentials
AWS Solutions Architect – Associate
Amazon Web Services
CERTIFIED 2026
MS, Management Information Systems + MBA
University of Nebraska – Omaha
2024–Present
BS, Management Information Systems
University of Nebraska – Omaha
2020–2023
Systems Development Certification
University of Nebraska – Omaha
2023
Capabilities

Engineering problems I can solve, not just software I've touched.

AWS infrastructure defined as code, event-driven backends, and AI integrated where it earns its place - not bolted on for the sake of it.

Event-Driven Systems
Event-driven by default when workloads don't require synchronous coupling.
EventBridgeAmazon SQSAWS LambdaECS FargateAPI GatewayCloudFront
Platform & Delivery
Repeatable environments, defined as code, shipped without click-ops.
AWS CDKTerraformGitHub ActionsOIDCCloudWatchDocker
Data & Multi-Tenancy
Tenant-aware authorization through identity, membership, roles, resource checks, and deliberate data modeling.
DynamoDBAmazon S3IAMWorkOS SSOJWTMulti-Tenant Architecture
Applied AI
Grounded, cost-aware - never the front door for routine requests.
Anthropic Claude APIOllamaAWS TranscribeVector EmbeddingsSemantic SearchAnthropic Tool Use
Application Layer
Python-first backends, React and TypeScript on the front end.
PythonFastAPIREST APIsMangumffmpegReactTypeScriptViteTailwind CSShls.js
Contact

Let's build the next production system.

Open to remote Cloud Engineer and Platform Engineer roles. If you're hiring, or just want to talk shop about AWS architecture - reach out.

LinkedIn GitHub Résumé
Reach Out