Resume: Edward Kahler

Summary

VP of Technology with 15+ years translating domain problems into technology that works for the people who depend on it. Career spans federal research and science museum deployments, Fortune 500 consulting delivery at Publicis Groupe, and cloud-native infrastructure for regulated higher-ed institutions. Currently leading engineering at a private-equity-backed analytics firm serving 34+ institutions, with a $10M+ TCO and a 25+ person distributed organization including a 20-person offshore team built from zero. I've written production Terraform and CDK stacks, built Bronze/Silver data lake architecture, and operated systems at consumer scale. The work I do best is at the intersection of non-technical vision and the systems that make it real.

Experience

VP of Technology Jul 2019 – Present

HCE, Private-equity-backed analytics firm serving 34+ higher education institutions · Chicago, IL

Led full cloud migration from on-premise infrastructure to AWS; eliminated $200K annual CapEx, reduced operational overhead to $4K/month, and cut critical process latency 80% (2 hours to 10 minutes).
Designed and shipped a layered data platform (Bronze/Silver/Serving) on AWS Glue/PySpark, Step Functions, S3, and Redshift Serverless. Metadata-driven pipeline design with Dynamic Schema Management and versioned data contracts eliminated brittle per-client transformations across 34+ institutional clients without per-client code branches.
Architected two B2B SaaS products: a metadata-driven peer benchmarking platform and a multi-tenant Net Price Calculator replatformed onto AWS microservices (.NET 8, ECS Fargate, React). Configuration-driven architecture with no per-client custom code; all institution logic driven from database configuration. Built with DOE/FERPA compliance and PII-free data architecture.
Instrumented the NPC microservices platform with AWS X-Ray distributed tracing across all six services, propagating correlation IDs through every ECS service boundary for per-request latency and error rate visibility end-to-end. Built job-level performance monitoring into the Workflow ETL framework using .NET and SQL Server system catalog queries, surfacing execution times, queue depth, and resource utilization to drive dynamic capacity provisioning rather than fixed allocations.
Applied LLM tooling across active engineering workstreams: evaluated multiple models for SPSS-to-PySpark syntax translation, deployed AI-assisted test case generation across the NPC estimation path, and used agentic implementation alongside senior architects at approximately 100x throughput on implementation tasks.
ISO 27001 and SOC 2 alignment established across all platform services; communicated security posture directly with client CISOs and compliance stakeholders.
Built and directed a 25+ person distributed engineering organization including a 20-person offshore team in India. $10M+ TCO including vendor contracts and platform licensing.
Stayed hands-on throughout: wrote production ETL pipelines, AWS CDK infrastructure stacks, shared Python libraries, and architectural decision records used across all delivery teams.

Technical Architect Jun 2013 – Jul 2019

Second Story (Razorfish Emerging Experiences / Publicis Groupe) · Chicago, IL

Solution architect and hands-on engineer for 6 years across Fortune 500 consulting engagements. Set technical direction and delivered production systems for T-Mobile, SFO, GrandVision, and others with direct client relationship ownership through delivery.
Architected Razorshop, a proximity-aware IoT retail platform integrating BLE beacons, MQTT, AWS IoT, and Adobe Experience Manager. Platform contributed to Publicis Groupe winning Adobe Digital Marketing Partner of the Year in 2015 and 2016.
Architected and operated the AWS backend for T-Mobile's Times Square New Year's Eve platform: 100,000+ concurrent sessions, 10,000+ images/hour, 100% uptime. Set up a distributed virtual war room with content moderators reviewing user-generated content in real time, clearing images for the live outdoor billboard feed while filtering inappropriate submissions. The moderation layer ran in parallel with the upload pipeline throughout the event with no display incidents.
Designed SFO Terminal 3 "Flight Deck," a three-tier real-time platform connecting large-scale projection, six multi-touch kiosks, and a mobile layer. Won 1st Place Creative Innovations Award (2014 Peggy G. Hereford Award).
Built the GrandVision magic mirror platform for China market launch. C++ camera server with triple-buffer architecture, libjpegturbo encoding, and custom UDP transport. Traveled to Shanghai to commission both flagship locations.

Research Software Engineer 2008 – 2013

Argonne National Laboratory / UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory · Chicago, IL

Invented the TacTile multi-touch platform, a large-format multi-touch system deployed at Argonne, SC13 supercomputing conference, and international venues. ACM-published (Computers in Entertainment, Vol. 11 No. 1, 2014).
Integrated with Intrepid, Argonne's 40,960-core Blue Gene/P supercomputer, for real-time scientific visualization at scale.

Core Competencies

Engineering Leadership

Team organization and scaling (onshore + offshore), TCO ownership ($10M+), executive and board communication, vendor and MSP management, organizational change management, Agile/Scrum

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS (Lambda, ECS/Fargate, Glue, S3, Step Functions, Redshift, API Gateway, EventBridge, CDK, Cognito, KMS, WAF); Terraform, Docker, CI/CD (blue/green, canary), disaster recovery and high availability

Data Engineering

ETL/ELT pipeline design, layered data platforms (Bronze/Silver/Serving), AWS Glue/PySpark, Redshift Serverless, dynamic schema management, Step Functions orchestration, data lake architecture

Architecture

Microservices, event-driven systems, multi-tenant SaaS, metadata-driven design, IoT and real-time systems, serverless architecture, infrastructure as code

Security & Compliance

ISO 27001, SOC 2, DOE/FERPA, PII-free data architecture, KMS encryption, secrets management, OWASP, client CISO engagement

Languages

Python, C#/.NET, C++ (expert), JavaScript/React, SQL; working knowledge of TypeScript, Swift, Java, GLSL

Education

Master of Science, Computer Science

University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Electronic Visualization Laboratory · Graduate research at Argonne National Laboratory; ACM publication (Computers in Entertainment, Vol. 11 No. 1, 2014)

2011

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science

University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)

2009