BWA Reduction

Ben Abbitt

Senior Solution Architect at Slalom. Full-stack across frontend, backend, infra, cloud, and now AI. The recurring shape of my work is finding the load-bearing wrong thing in a team's tooling or process and replacing it without stopping work in flight — lately, AI-agent toolchains and HITL audit systems that let small teams scale where headcount used to be the answer.

benjamin.abbitt@gmail.com LinkedIn ↗ GitHub ↗ St. Louis, MO
2020 — present · Cloud · AI · software architecture
Senior Solution Architect · Slalom Consulting
notable engagements ↓
A lot of different industries over a lot of years. The common thread: show up, find the load-bearing wrong thing, replace it without stopping the work already in flight.
AI Lead — State Government · HHS eligibility document processing
  • Architected a document-intelligence pipeline on Google Cloud (Vertex AI, Document AI, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, GCS) so the state can absorb H.R.1's new Medicaid verification load — 6-month redeterminations for the expansion population, work-requirement checks at application and redetermination, monthly address validation — with minimal to no growth in reviewer headcount.
  • Made AI output auditable at intake volume: per-field confidence scores combine image quality, agreement across intentionally-varied prompts, plausibility validation, and model logprobs to route reviewer effort to flagged fields rather than whole documents.
  • Working end-to-end prototype delivered in 4 weeks; engagement ongoing.
Solution Architect — Cryptocurrency · GitHub Enterprise → Cloud migration
  • Built an AI-agent migration toolchain — TDD AI agents producing per-repo migration tooling under HITL orchestration — that ported thousands of repositories from corporate GitHub Enterprise to GitHub Cloud in 6 months, meeting data-residency requirements; downstream client developer review raised minimal additional feedback.
  • Extended the toolchain to the company's project-management and developer-experience tooling, partnering directly with GitHub engineering on platform gaps.
Solution Architect / Technical Lead — Agriculture · Customer & Billing Management
  • Architected and led a team to implement an asynchronous customer & billing management system, replacing two prior attempts that were failing due to unacceptable performance.
  • Solution exceeded requirements by an order of magnitude — 3s end-to-end update time vs a 30s requirement.
Solution Architect — Tax · Tax preparation software back-end
  • Architected a data migration for a tax-preparation software company that will result in net savings of greater than $1M USD / yr in direct licensing costs, plus significant reduction in operating expense.
Solution Architect — Insurance · Single-pane-of-glass CRM
  • Architected and managed a team to implement a custom CRM that presented insurance sales associates a unified dashboard of their actionable items.
  • Pivoted mid-project to an event-driven architecture for non-time-critical approvals — durable through-queue data and scheduleable loading windows for off-peak cost — without disrupting in-flight team work.
Solution Architect — Heavy Equipment Manufacturing · IoT data management & processing engine
  • Built load-testing infrastructure that exposed novel scaling failure modes in Kinesis shortly after its release — surfacing defects new to AWS engineering — and drove the client's pivot to a different storage architecture.
2017 — 2020 · Architecture · rescue work
Application / Cloud / DevOps Architect · Pariveda Solutions
  • Built a vertical-slice generator (microservice + frontend) — slice setup from weeks (largely approvals and provisioning queues) to minutes.
  • Containerized a 20-year-old tax-prep app suite — dev setup from a week+ to hours.
  • Rescued a two-months-late online-ordering app; re-architected off a global mutable store, shipped on time.
  • Diagnosed a Hibernate misconfiguration on a project inherited from another consulting firm — the entire database was being loaded into the application's memory; fixed it.
Most of what I know about pulling a project out of a hole came from these years.
2014 — 2017 · Troubleshooting · velocity · devops
Software Craftsman · Pariveda Solutions
  • Shipped a checksum-based defense against URL manipulation in a banking app in under six hours.
  • Cut mobile-app production builds from multi-hour to single-digit minutes.
  • Parachuted into teams for weeks-to-months as architectural + devops troubleshooter.
The parachute-in role taught me to read a codebase the way a doctor reads a chart.
2011 — 2014 · Forensic engineering · Android · TDD
Software Craftsman · American Airlines
  • Took over a ~50k-line app that had been running unversioned on a single server; after that server failed, reassembled it from decompiled binaries and surviving code scraps.
  • Android SME on a committee measuring vendor-change risk to in-flight entertainment.
  • Taught TDD to AA.com developers.
Rebuilding from decompiled binaries was the week I stopped taking source control for granted.

Skills

Polyglot dev
Rust · Go (Golang) · Python · Java · Kotlin
AI / LLM
TDD AI agents · HITL orchestration · Prompt engineering · LLM-assisted migration · Claude
IaC
Hashicorp Terraform / OpenTofu · Docker · Kubernetes · Helm · Podman
CI/CD
Jenkins · Cloudbuild · GitHub Workflows
FOSS I ship
Context Loom (ctxloom.dev) · Angzarr (angzarr.io)

Certifications

  • Google Cloud Platform — Cloud DevOps Engineer · Professional · AI Leader
  • Amazon Web Services — Certified DevOps Engineer · Professional · Architect · Professional (historical)