Looking for a job

Eric Ballou

@ericballou

Message

I’m an enterprise AI architect building production agentic platforms with governance and FinOps.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for roles where I can design end-to-end agentic platforms with evaluation and guardrails, and partner across engineering, security, and finance to deliver measurable production impact with strong FinOps and governance.

I’m an enterprise architect with 25+ years designing and shipping integration, data, and AI platforms across Fortune 500s, mid-market SaaS, and consulting. I build production agentic systems end to end—from pattern selection and model routing through evaluation, guardrails, and FinOps.

I pair hands-on engineering with the governance, vendor leverage, and TCO work that gets AI programs funded and kept. I’ve shipped AI agents that cut team time 12% weekly, eliminated $100K/yr in vendor spend and $10K/month in AWS cost for SOC 2 readiness, and led cross-functional delivery teams to deliver secure, scalable AI capabilities with C-suite trust.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Founder & Principal Consultant

Current

Astute Strategy LLC

Aug 2023 - Present (2 years 10 months)

Advised mid-market and enterprise clients on AI architecture, agentic platform design, and AI governance from opportunity discovery through production delivery and FinOps. Designed multi-agent reference architectures and translated patterns into delivery roadmaps while producing quantified business cases for run-rate and capability impact.

Agent Architectures Multi agent orchestration AI Governance Model Routing GuardRails FinOps TCO Modeling

AI Architect & Agent Specialist

BMC Software

Nov 2023 - Apr 2026 (2 years 5 months)

Shipped two production AI agents, cutting team time 12% weekly for 12 users and saving $250K by replacing manual processes during product consolidation. Served as SRE owner for a production agent serving 2,500 customer users, and implemented governance checkpoints with deployment automation and AI testing process improvements.

Agentic Systems M365 Copilot SRE AI Testing Docker CI CD FinOps

Cybersecurity & ML/DevOps Manager

ZenLedger, Inc.

Jun 2022 - Aug 2023 (1 year 2 months)

Built ZenLedger’s security program from zero, achieving SOC 2 Type I readiness and preparing for PCI-DSS and SOC 2 Type II. Eliminated $100K/yr in vendor spend and $10K/month in AWS cost while piloting early LLM tooling to shape an internal AI adoption path.

SOC II PCI DSS Vendor Consolidation Cloud Cost Optimization LLM Evaluation

Supply Chain Solutions Architect

Viasat

Mar 2014 - Jun 2022 (8 years 3 months)

Architected and shipped a supply chain data science capability with secure hybrid data lakes on Rancher/Kubernetes across AWS and VMware, enabling dashboards and Slack chatbot workflows. Cut weekend maintenance windows and improved response times via scripting and observability with InfluxDB/Grafana, secured $50K for a new product MVP, and enabled vendor assessments adopted by three business units

Data Lake VMWare Tableau Grafana InfluxDB Observability

Solution Architect

Saicon, Inc.

Nov 2021 - Apr 2022 (5 months)

Rescued a stalling blockchain MVP by rebuilding the delivery roadmap into phased, realistic commitments. Established Agile and DevOps cycles on Azure DevOps and designed an MVP infrastructure pattern on Kubernetes with Helm and IaC deployable to FedRAMP or commercial cloud.

Azure DevOps Agile Delivery Kubernetes Helm Multi Cloud Validation FedRAMP Roadmapping

Solution Architect

Perficient

Oct 2010 - May 2013 (2 years 7 months)

Managed four globally distributed delivery teams plus two project managers across concurrent enterprise engagements, salvaging a failing Oracle trade-floor implementation by redesigning architecture around event-driven patterns. Led full-lifecycle middleware migration from BEA to Oracle Fusion Middleware and built a centralized logging and exception framework reused across client engagements.

Event Driven Architecture Oracle Fusion Middleware Engineering Logging Enterprise Integration Delivery leadership