About Me

Human Mode

The work

The interesting work starts as a vague request in a room of smart people. I stay until there is a system the team can ship, support, and explain.

The interesting work starts as a vague request in a room of smart people. I stay until there is a system the team can ship, support, and explain.

Right now that looks like Principal AI & Data Solution Architect at Hakkōda: production agentic systems, data platforms, retrieval, governance, and tool use, from the first architecture conversation through delivery.

IBM came first. GenAI, data, product, advisory, enablement. Patents, conference stages, certification exams, teams from startups to Fortune 50. The titles kept changing. The question never did: can the people who have to run this actually run it?

I build the thing and I explain the thing. I have never found those to be two different jobs.

Outside the work

Writing and side projects are where ideas get stress-tested. Something promising and fragile is usually more interesting than a polished success story.

The reset is a ski slope, a trail with my dog Theo, a campsite, or somewhere I have not been. I make music. Listen on Spotify.

Volunteering for environmental work and mentoring people who took an unconventional route into tech matter about as much as the rest of it. That is how this career started.

Experience

Hakkōda (an IBM Company)

Principal AI & Data Solution Architect

Employment period
12.2025—
Duration
10m

This is the first job where the tools caught up to the way I already wanted to work. I run agentic coding harnesses as actual development infrastructure, every day, on client code.

  • Multi-agent framework under a Snowflake and Databricks platform migration at a scale nobody can hold in their head
  • Orchestrator, subagents, memory that survives context windows, real tool use
  • Office hours and training for GTM and partner teams
Work loop for Principal AI & Data Solution Architect at Hakkōda.
HOLD
00:00:00 / 00:08:00
Principal AI & Data Solution Architect
  • enablement
  • systems_thinking
  • facilitation
  • teaching
  • working_in_ambiguity

IBM

Senior Product Manager & Enablement Lead

Employment period
12.2023—11.2025
Duration
2y

This is where I figured out that I am not a PM who hands things off. I took SkillZone from interface through architecture through the content itself, end to end.

  • IBM Entrepreneur of the Year for SkillZone — I still think of it as the company being surprised that someone shipped
  • Co-authored IBM Generative AI certification exams
  • Stopped treating building and teaching as separate jobs
Work loop for Senior Product Manager & Enablement Lead at IBM.
HOLD
00:00:00 / 00:08:00
Senior Product Manager & Enablement Lead
  • end_to_end_ownership
  • enablement
  • instruction
  • product_judgment

Advisory Data & AI Architect

Employment period
04.2021—11.2023
Duration
2y 8m

IBM pulled me onto their global Black Belt team: a slightly ridiculous name for people sent into the hard rooms. Finance, retail, healthcare.

  • AI and MLOps from data prep to production, usually starting from requirements nobody had written down yet
  • 30+ reusable accelerators so other teams could prototype without calling me; delivery time dropped up to 40%
Work loop for Advisory Data & AI Architect at IBM.
HOLD
00:00:00 / 00:08:00
Advisory Data & AI Architect
  • stakeholder_navigation
  • knowledge_transfer
  • consulting
  • leverage

Sokratic Data

Data Solutions Consultant

Employment period
02.2017—04.2021
Duration
4y 3m

The first job where "it works on my machine" stopped being an acceptable answer.

  • ETL from PostgreSQL into S3 and Snowflake that cut processing time 75%
  • Segmentation project that took 25% off a client's churn
  • Migrated legacy warehouses to BigQuery without taking anyone's dashboards down
  • Mentor people who did not come into tech the standard way, same as I did not
Work loop for Data Solutions Consultant at Sokratic Data.
HOLD
00:00:00 / 00:08:00
Data Solutions Consultant
  • mentoring
  • accountability
  • client_delivery

Technologies

Toolkit ready, 36 tools

  1. Agentic AI

  2. MLOps

  3. Data Sources

  4. DataOps

  5. Cloud Platforms

  6. Engineering Delivery

taylor_ai is writing

playing script.