Dennis S.

Second set of eyes on your cloud, data or AI architecture, before you build it or buy it. I review proposed designs and tell you, in writing, what's sound, what will break, what it will really cost, and what I'd change. Your team or your vendor does the build. I've spent 24 years designing and running the platforms I now review. WHAT YOU GET A short written assessment your engineers can act on and your executives can read. It covers the overall approach, service choices, security and data flow, AI and LLM design, cost and scaling assumptions, compliance risk, and alternatives worth considering. I can add a walkthrough call and a question list for your vendor. WHAT I REVIEW AWS (including GovCloud) and Azure architectures. Generative AI and RAG designs on Amazon Bedrock and Azure OpenAI, including what data leaves the boundary. Document processing and OCR pipelines. Data platforms and governance: Databricks, Snowflake, Synapse, Fabric, Purview. Migration plans. Vendor proposals and buy-versus-build decisions. WHERE THE JUDGMENT COMES FROM VP of Enterprise Architecture at General Reinsurance, a Berkshire Hathaway company, where I chaired the Architecture Review Board. VP of Big Data Analytics and Cloud Architecture at Citizens Bank. Big Data Manager and Analytics Enterprise Architect at IBM Watson Health, where I ran petabyte-scale healthcare data on AWS under HIPAA, HITECH and SOC. Senior Enterprise Solutions Architect on large federal portfolios, with design reviews at every release gate. FinOps Certified Practitioner: $1.2M and $4.2M in realized annual savings from platform rationalization, so cost gets real scrutiny. HOW I WORK Part-time, usually 5 to 20 hours a week or a fixed-scope review of 1 to 4 weeks. Fixed price for defined reviews. Eastern time. I'll tell you upfront what fits in the scope. Certifications: FinOps Certified Practitioner, AWS Solutions Architect Associate, AWS Cloud Practitioner, Microsoft Azure Fundamentals, Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals.