Open to opportunities

Robert Lawhead

@robertlawhead

Message

Senior AI and DevOps engineer building scalable MLOps platforms and production-ready LLM pipelines.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I seek senior AI/MLOps roles building secure, scalable ML platforms and production LLMs, where I can lead infrastructure, improve observability, and deliver measurable impact.

I am a Senior AI Engineer and DevOps specialist who solves messy, real-world problems with clean code, scalable infrastructure, and a healthy dose of sarcasm.

At TriNetX I deployed production-grade LLM pipelines and RAG architectures that sped clinical-trial feasibility analysis by 47%, designed QLoRA fine-tuning that reduced hallucination by 32%, and built a distributed RAG engine delivering sub-second retrieval across 10M+ clinical documents. I also refactored federated EHR ETL pipelines to cut data latency from 12 hours to under 90 minutes while improving downstream model accuracy.

I deliver repeatable MLOps and observability—MLflow, Airflow, DVC, Kubeflow, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana—across AWS, Azure, and GCP, and have built multi-tenant SaaS platforms for 200+ research clients with secure, compliant controls. I design and ship REST/gRPC APIs, CI/CD pipelines, and serverless inference solutions to make models reliable, auditable, and cost-efficient.

I bring practical expertise in LLM fine-tuning, vector search, data engineering, and cloud-native infrastructure, and I prioritize security, reproducibility, and collaboration. I’m looking to join teams that value production-grade ML, scalability, and measurable impact.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Senior Software Engineer

TriNetX, LLC

Aug 2020 - Jul 2025 (4 years 11 months)

Deployed production LLM pipelines with Hugging Face and LangChain (RAG) for federated patient cohort searches, improving clinical trial feasibility analysis speed by 47% and enabling sub-second retrieval across 10M+ documents. Built scalable MLOps pipelines (MLflow, Airflow, Kubeflow) and refactored ETL to reduce data latency from 12 hours to under 90 minutes, improving downstream model accuracy b

Lang Chain QLoRA Kubeflow Pinecone MLFlow Pyspark Kubernetes

Senior Software Engineer

Medlogix, LLC

Jan 2018 - Jun 2020 (2 years 5 months)

Developed ML pipelines for automated medical bill classification and NLP-driven document parsing, reducing manual review workload by 42% and claim turnaround time by 26%. Designed and fine-tuned transformer models and RAG workflows (FAISS) and implemented CI/CD and IaC with Terraform and Helm for multi-cloud deployments.

scikit learn XGBoost SpaCy fastAPI Kubernetes Terraform Airflow Faiss

Software Engineer

Sibedge, LLC

May 2016 - Jan 2018 (1 year 8 months)

Delivered a multilingual document classification system achieving 93% average precision and reduced triage workflows by 34%. Built distributed training pipelines (TensorFlow/PyTorch) that increased training throughput 4.2× and implemented observability with Prometheus and Grafana.

TensorFlow PyTorch Faiss Flask Kubernetes Prometheus Docker React

Software Developer

Sibedge, LLC

May 2012 - Apr 2016 (3 years 11 months)

Built a probabilistic classification model that reduced manual triage effort by 72% and developed real-time anomaly detection pipelines using Kafka and TensorFlow. Implemented containerized CI/CD and IaC with Jenkins, Terraform, and Docker to enable scalable deployments.