Open to opportunities

Charlton Clayton

@charltonclayton

Message

Senior software engineer specializing in AI/ML-driven data engineering solutions.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I am seeking senior roles leveraging AI/ML and data engineering to build scalable, secure systems with strong cross-functional collaboration and opportunities to lead technical strategy.

I am a results-driven senior software engineer with 14+ years building scalable backend systems, data pipelines, and AI/ML solutions across cloud platforms. I specialize in Python and SQL, designing secure, high-performance APIs and operationalizing ML models for real-time and batch workflows that deliver measurable business impact.

Throughout my career I have reduced latency and duplicates, improved throughput, and automated deployment and governance using Terraform, Airflow, Kafka, Spark, and container orchestration. I collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to ensure compliance, observability, and ROI-driven model optimization while mentoring engineers and driving technical leadership.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Software Engineer

Current

Sword Health

Sep 2023 - Present (2 years)

Developed and deployed a scalable AI-powered care recommendation engine and optimized cloud-native ETL pipelines to ingest and unify device and transaction data while ensuring HIPAA/GDPR compliance.

Python SQL ETL Kafka Terraform Airflow REST APIs

Senior Data Engineer

Gracenote

Apr 2021 - Aug 2023 (2 years 4 months)

Designed and optimized scalable ingestion pipelines and entity resolution workflows, reducing ingestion latency by 35% and duplicate records by 40% while enabling near-real-time EPG corrections via streaming.

Python SQL Apache Spark Airflow Kafka Flink Data Modeling API Development

Senior Python Engineer

Muso.AI

Mar 2020 - Mar 2021 (1 year)

Built Python backend services and ingestion pipelines for partner and DSP data, implemented entity-resolution and anti-fraud checks, and delivered secure, versioned APIs with observability and CI/CD practices.

Python fastAPI Airflow PostgreSQL Elasticsearch Docker Kubernetes

Platform Engineer

Logicworks

Jul 2014 - Dec 2019 (5 years 5 months)

Implemented Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and CloudFormation, optimized container platforms (ECS/EKS), and established CI/CD deploy strategies with observability and cost-governance practices.

Terraform CloudFormation AWS EKS Jenkins Docker CI CD Monitoring

Java Backend Developer

Genpact

Jul 2010 - May 2014 (3 years 10 months)

Built and maintained REST/SOAP services using Java and Spring, integrated messaging consumers for reliable processing, and ensured test automation and CI with Jenkins and SonarQube-driven quality gates.

Java Spring MVC JMS Junit Maven Jenkins Hibernate Soap Rest

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Cornell University

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science

2006 - 2010

Completed a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with coursework covering algorithms, systems, and software engineering from August 2006 to May 2010.