Curriculum vitae
Profile
I run production AI infrastructure and developer platforms at Moody's Analytics, with 17 years building systems at scale, with the last three years focused on AI: RAG pipelines, LLM evaluation frameworks, agentic workflows, and the developer platform that hundreds of engineers depend on to build, ship, and operate software. I also own the technical program management layer underneath that work: readiness gates, risk and dependency tracking, and cross-functional governance across Platform Engineering, SRE, Security, and Business Unit teams, so platform and AI initiatives ship on stable, predictable timelines. I hold a Master's in Data Science from UC Berkeley and teach RAG, agents, and Claude to the LatinX engineering community through Techqueria workshops and my podcast.
Experience
Moody's Analytics · 2009 – presentDirector, Developer & Platform Experience
2024 – Present · Moody's Analytics · San Francisco, CA (Remote)Own and operate the developer experience platform serving multiple enterprise product teams across Moody's Analytics. Partner directly with engineering leads across business units to implement AI systems, diagnose adoption blockers, and drive platform onboarding from NPE through Canary to Production, responsible for outcomes, not handoffs. Drove adoption of AI-assisted development tools (Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Claude Code) and designed MCP server integrations across internal knowledge bases, API specs, and source repositories, expanding AI-native developer workflows at scale. Architected the MAP platform onboarding framework with clear NPE → Canary → Production readiness gates for Business Units adopting the Moody's Analytics Platform. Lead cross-functional execution across Platform Engineering, SRE, Security, and BU engineering teams. Guided Business Unit development and SRE teams onto MAP's standard observability stack (Datadog with PagerDuty integrations) and coordinated incident management with the MAP Core and SRE teams, since a platform-level outage cascades to every onboarded BU application.
AI Architect
2023 – 2024 · Moody's Analytics · New York, NY (Remote)Designed and shipped RAG pipelines, vector search infrastructure, embedding workflows, and agentic systems for enterprise product teams, diagnosing real-world AI failure modes (retrieval mismatch, hallucination, latency) and delivering architectures teams could ship with confidence. Designed and operated the LLM evaluation framework for generative AI products at Moody's Analytics, built on Databricks, Spark, and MLflow, establishing Recall@k, Precision@k, MRR, and groundedness as standard evaluation practice adopted across AI product teams. Delivered hands-on training on embeddings, vector search, prompting, and LLM evaluation to multiple engineering organizations, transferring production AI literacy at scale across teams building enterprise AI products.
Associate Director, DevOps Architect
2015 – 2023 · Moody's Analytics · New York, NY (Remote)Led DevOps architecture and platform engineering across a multi-cloud environment (AWS, Azure). Designed secure-by-default CI/CD pipelines, containerization strategies (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, GitHub Actions) adopted across multiple engineering teams. Drove the transition from monolithic deployment models to microservices, reducing release cycle time significantly. Led on-prem to cloud migration strategy, including data center sunset initiatives and workload decoupling. Coordinated InfoSec standards, compliance controls, and operational readiness across engineering teams, integrating security tooling into developer workflows without sacrificing delivery speed, and advised engineering teams on cloud design, scalability, and cost optimization across multiple product lines.
Senior DevOps Engineer
2009 – 2015 · Moody's Analytics · San Francisco, CABuilt automated build pipelines, CI systems, monitoring infrastructure, and early cloud deployments supporting multiple product lines. Developed installation tooling, deployment automation, and customization frameworks, improving reliability, repeatability, and developer workflows across the organization.
Education
Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS)
2021 – 2023 · UC Berkeley School of Information · Berkeley, CABachelor of Science, Computer Science
California State University, Monterey BayCommunity & speaking
- Host,AI Builders: LatinX Edition: a practitioner-focused podcast teaching Claude, RAG, agents, and LLM infrastructure through conversations with practitioners shaping real-world AI adoption. 6+ episodes since September 2025, distributed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music.
- Instructor at Techqueria: delivers hands-on AI workshops to LatinX engineers and early-career practitioners covering Claude, RAG systems, embeddings, agentic workflows, and LLM evaluation fundamentals. Authored open-source education materials (GenAI-Tutorial, AI Para Todos, Multi-Doc RAG with LlamaIndex) used in community workshops.
- Builds with Claude Code daily, shipping this portfolio, live MCP server implementations, and edge AI workers on Cloudflare Workers as production engineering artifacts. Uses AI-assisted development as a core part of production engineering workflow, not a side experiment.
- Speaker: Techqueria Tech Summit (Oct 2025),Building AI Agents for Real-World Workflows; Oakland Tech Week (Nov 2025), AI Agents from Scratch; Latino AI Summit (Jan 2026), RAG Chat + AI Agents.
- Writing:medium.com/@vhr1975