Tyler Walters
Platform Engineering | AI Transformation | Enterprise Architecture
Portland, OR
jobs@tylerwalts.com
Current Experience
Claritas Rx • Director of Platform Architecture • San Francisco, CA (Remote Portland)
2024 → Present • Digital health SaaS company building the Ascend platform for specialty biopharmaceutical data intelligence. Founding architect of Ascend 2.0, progressing from Principal Architect to Director of Data Platform Engineering to Director of Platform Architecture, reporting to the CTO.
Technology Strategy
- Defined Ascend Data & SaaS platform technical roadmap with CTO, aligning engineering investment to business growth.
- Transformed legacy data services to a SaaS product model, unlocking Ascend 2.0 as a commercially scalable platform.
- Created SDLC using a trunk-based multi-language monorepo with app and infrastructure CI/CD pipelines; top contributor across ~7k commits from 100+ engineers.
Platform Engineering
- Built Ascend 2.0 foundations from the start: AWS Organizations landing zone, Control Tower and Transit Gateway cross-account networking.
- Scaled new Data Ingestion Platform to 45 biopharma customers, 425 data partners and ~2k data sets processing ~20GB incoming data/day.
- Designed HIPAA/SOC2 Iceberg lakehouse on Glue/PySpark, Airflow and Lake Formation with shared libraries, de-identification and CI/CD.
- Built Self-Service, the internal operations product for Ascend 2.0 — React UI over ~20 microservice APIs for ingestion, lineage, pipeline status and audited data access with SSO.
- Built internal developer automations reducing engineer onboarding from 4w to 1d with automated provisioning, sandboxes and tooling.
AI Transformation
- Established AI governance and guardrails enabling autonomous SDLC within HIPAA/SOC2.
- Built production AI agents for pipeline triage, hypercare monitoring and data ingestion, with human-in-the-loop approvals, caller-scoped MCP tool access and PHI scanning.
Organizational Leadership
- Helped scale a distributed engineering org from 8 to 45 full time employees plus onshore/offshore vendor teams through structured hiring, onboarding automation and career coaching.
- Led 16-person team as Director of Data Platform Engineering, owning product roadmap and operations.
Prior Experience
Roar Social • Backend Software Architect • Los Angeles, CA (Remote Portland)
2022 → 2024 • Transformed a startup demo app into a secure, scalable, production-ready social platform in 9 months, leading architecture design and backend implementation with a team of 25 engineers.
- Built event-driven personalized feed generation, content discovery, moderation and donation flow systems.
- Automated deployments using CI/CD pipelines, and tested delivery APIs to auto-scale to 100K TPS at sub-50ms average latency.
- Established operational excellence program — dashboards, runbooks and auto-generated ticketing on metric anomalies and log errors.
Amazon • Cloud Application Architect • Portland, OR
2018 → 2022 • Held multiple engineering roles across Amazon and AWS, architecting hyperscale distributed systems and leading enterprise modernization engagements for some of AWS most demanding customers.
Hyperscale Distributed Systems (sellercentral.amazon.com)
- Scaled data routing service to 320K TPS at 50ms latency managing 1.6 PB of seller inventory data from 14 high-volume event sources.
- Led modernization of 160+ data clients across 90 teams, driving 30% reduction in high-severity tickets.
Enterprise Modernization (aws.amazon.com/training)
- Defined microservices modernization roadmap for a C# monolith serving millions of AWS Training students.
- Scaled LMS to 50K TPS for re:Invent; led EU cookie consent compliance across all AWS training web properties.
Executive Technical Leadership (aws.amazon.com/professional-services)
- Led cloud-native engagements for Whole Foods eStore, DoorDash canary deploys, Alexa Music Skills and Portland General Electric.
- Certified AWS Speaker; delivered technical guidance and architecture direction to Fortune 500 executive stakeholders.
- Shaped 15–20 proposals, scoping effort, timeline and team mix into SOWs that launched new client engagements.
Nike • Tech Lead, Trial Zone • Portland, OR
2016 → 2018 • Scaled an agency-created retail experience POC to 9 flagship Nike locations across US, Europe and China, supporting digitally enhanced AR running and basketball experiences.
- Built CI/CD for on-site server fleets with Kinect sensors, video streams and game engines supported by cloud monitoring.
- Built media content delivery system and coordinated new content pack releases timed to each new shoe drop.
- Automated site-specific venue and product configuration, letting the system roll out to new locations without rework.
Consulting Experience
Slalom Consulting • Solution Principal • Chicago, IL
2010 → 2016 • Business and technology consulting firm. Progressed from Consultant to Solution Architect to Solution Principal. Co-founded a DevOps-focused delivery practice and led cloud modernization engagements across enterprise clients.
- Co-founded DevOps practice; built and led a team of 9 SDE consultants across cloud modernization and SaaS delivery engagements.
- Led pursuit and delivery of 7 projects generating $8M+ revenue; project oversight for up to 22 developers.
- Influenced client executives on cloud-first strategy through bootcamps, tech talks and conference presentations.
Hitachi Consulting • Senior Consultant • Portland, OR
2006 → 2010 • Led end-to-end delivery of transformation programs across Education, Healthcare, Retail, Finance, Manufacturing and Distribution. Delivered cloud and data modernization for enterprise clients using .NET, Java and MSBI stacks.
WitMatix Web Development Services • Founder • Corvallis, OR
2004 → 2006 • Founded and operated a web development and online services company, managing local and outsourced teams to deliver custom applications and e-commerce systems.
Past Client Engagements
Qlik Technologies • Led architecture and initial operations of QlikCloud.com, transforming an enterprise hosted service into an on-demand SaaS in under a year. Delivered a globally distributed, HA and auto-scaling platform on AWS.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan • Led member portal from POC to production, using IaC and CI/CD to automate environments and onboard 22 developers.
Providence Health & Services • Partnered with Director of Healthcare Intelligence to establish BI governance and deliver first data marts, including TeleStroke analytics and knee replacement pricing models.
Walgreens • Delivered time-sensitive data de-identification system to meet compliance deadlines across pharmacy ETL pipelines.
Additional engagements include Pepsi, Western Governors University, Echo Global Logistics, Law Bulletin, Standard Insurance, Russell Investments, Columbia Sportswear, Waste Management, Johnstone Supply, Cascade Corporation, Microsoft, CorVel Software, Knowledge Learning Corporation
Publications
Governing Claude Code Usage [ Link 1 ]
2026 • How a regulated healthcare data company governs Claude Code by running it on Amazon Bedrock in its own AWS accounts, with per-user IAM attribution, invocation logging, DLP scanning and cost tracking.