Personal Information

Professional Profile

Director of Software Engineering with 20+ years of enterprise experience building and scaling high-performance data platforms — from on-prem Hadoop clusters to trillion-row cloud warehouses. Currently leading the technology function at an energy trading firm operating across six ISO electricity markets.

Featured at AWS re:Invent

  • AWS highlighted an architecture I designed and built on stage at re:Invent 2018 — a horizontally scalable pipeline using Step Functions, Batch, Lambda, Aurora Serverless, and SNS to parse thousands of files in parallel

AWS Certified

  • I hold a growing list of AWS certifications, including Certified Solutions Architect Associate

Regularly Work With:

Python, Pandas, Data Lake, Data Warehouse (like Snowflake), Powerworld, Java, Amazon Web Services (AWS Batch, Step Functions, Redshift, S3, Athena, Lambda, etc), Scala, Serverless, Web Programming, (Javascript, CSS, etc), SQL, etc

Summa Cum Laude graduate (with a 3.99 GPA) from North Carolina State University, where I was part of the inaugural class of the University Honors Program.

I have 20 years of professional experience and I'm very comfortable learning, adapting, juggling lots of responsibilities, and staying ahead of the curve.

Work Experience

September 2025 - Present

Director of Software Engineering

Appian Way Energy Partners, Full-Time - Durham, NC / Cambridge, MA

Leading the technology function for an FTR trading firm active across six ISO electricity markets (PJM, MISO, ERCOT, CAISO, SPP, NYISO).

  • Own cloud infrastructure and architecture end to end — AWS compute, storage, and networking supporting power systems modeling and trading analytics
  • Design and operate a Snowflake data platform at trillion-row scale, including clustering strategy, cost optimization, and query performance for power systems sensitivity data
  • Architect large-scale simulation workloads: Python orchestration of PowerWorld Simulator across auto-scaling Windows compute fleets
  • Lead engineering strategy, hiring, and mentoring while remaining hands-on in Python, SQL, and systems design

August 2021 - September 2025

Principal Data Engineer

Appian Way Energy Partners, Full-Time - Durham, NC / Cambridge, MA

One quarter of the engineering team, focusing on cloud, scalability, and general architecture — heavy Python, SQL, and PowerWorld.

  • Built and scaled the data platform underpinning FTR auction analysis across multiple ISO markets
  • Designed cloud architecture bridging AWS, Snowflake, and Windows-based power systems simulation

Promoted to Director of Software Engineering in September 2025.

October 2017 - August 2021

Senior Principal Data Engineer

Sensus, Full-Time - Durham, NC (promotion from previous title)

Continually enhancing our corporate data lake, which we rebuilt to be 100% cloud native.

  • Extensive use of AWS technologies, including
    • AWS Batch (containers, docker, ECS, ECR)
    • AWS Step Functions
    • AWS EMR (spark, hadoop, hardware optimization, cost efficiency)
    • AWS Kinesis (streaming)
    • AWS Lambda (java, javascript, nodejs, lambda layers, python)
    • AWS Athena (presto, SQL)
    • AWS Redshift
    • AWS Redshift Spectrum
    • AWS Glue
  • Designed and built multiple customer-facing solutions for data access API over Redshift, including management of the data
  • Designed and built horizontally scalable process to parse up to thousands of files simultaneously
    • Worked with Amazon to present the architecture at Re:Invent conference
  • Designed and built horizontally scalable process to perform ETL on virtually unlimited size incremental data

August 2014 - September 2017

Senior Data Engineer

Sensus, Full-Time - Durham, NC

Design, develop, and maintain a Hadoop stack for smart grid analytics, including web-based GUI tools for querying, viewing, and reporting data.

  • Built our Hadoop cluster from scratch and scaled and maintained it to trillions of rows in scale
  • Extensive use of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) including Hive, HBase, Ambari, Spark, Tez, etc.
    • Hive
    • HDFS
    • HBase
    • Ambari
    • Spark
    • Phoenix
    • NiFi
  • Built several Javascript-based dashboards for interacting with data (JQuery, Bootstrap, Apache Phoenix, Google Maps, etc)
  • Integrated Apache NiFi for fully customizable ingest flow

2012 - 2014

Level III Engineer

Cisco, Full-Time - RTP, NC

Front-end (JSP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, DOJO, AJAX, etc) and back-end (Java, SQL) work on a distributed, scalable, cloud-based application that uses technologies like SNMP and FTP to collect data from network devices and provide smart interfaces for interacting with the data.

Tech: Java, Javascript, AJAX, JQuery, Dojo, Clearcase, SQL, XML, JAXB, JSON, Linux, Clearcase, Jenkins, etc

2008 - 2012

Senior Fuel Engineer

Gilbarco Veeder-Root, Full-Time - RTP, NC

Full-time software developer/designer. My job was to help design and implement bug fixes and enhancements to an enormous base that runs at almost 30,000 sites across the country and processes almost half a billion dollars every day.

Tech: Java, C, C#, C++, SQL, XML, JAXB, VB, VMWare,

2004 - 2008

Previous Roles

Software engineering roles building enterprise Java applications.

Education

2000 - 2005

North Carolina State University

Computer Science - 3.99 GPA, Summa Cum Laude

  • Benjamin Franklin Scholar
  • Order of 30 & 3
  • Founding member of the University Honors Program
  • University Scholars Program
  • Also pursued degrees in Environmental Engineering and Philosophy

Technical Skills

%

Cloud Architecture & Strategy

10+ years

I helped build our corporate data lake from scratch on a Hadoop cluster, and then rebuilt the whole thing to be serverless in the cloud.

%

Data Platform Engineering

10+ years

Data Warehouse, Data Lake, Snowflake, Redshift, MSSQL Server, Glue, Athena, etc

%

AWS Batch / Step Functions

7 years

I built two large, distinct projects focused on leveraging Batch and Step Functions to run tens of thousands of lambda functions in parallel.

%

Serverless

8+ years

We rebuilt our entire data lake from the ground up to be 100% cloud-native and almost completely serverless. Our ETL is designed over Lambda and Batch, and even our EMR clusters are ephemeral.

%

Java

20 years

Java is the first language I ever learned. I'm extremely comfortable with object-oriented design all the associated tools like Maven / Jenkins / IntelliJ, etc.

%

Javascript

14 years

I've done a lot of web development over the past decade - including a good amount of NodeJS code for Lambda functions. I am very comfortable with Javascript and many of the associated technologies like Bootstrap, JQuery, etc.

%

SQL / Redshift / Snowflake

12 years

I've written and tuned a lot of SQL code over the years, including MS SQL server, Redshift, MySQL, Hive, Phoenix, and Spark. Recently focused on Snowflake.

%

Python / Pandas

Primary daily language

Python is the backbone of my current role: production data pipelines, Snowflake integration, PowerWorld automation, and Dash/Plotly dashboards.

Freelance

Consulting

Big Data Technology Consulting

I advise clients on data platform architecture, performance, and cost — the same problems I solve at trillion-row scale in my day job:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS):
    • EMR
    • Batch
    • Step Functions
    • Athena
    • Redshift / Spectrum
    • Glue
    • Dynamo DB
    • Elasticache
    • Elastic Beanstalk
  • Snowflake:
    • Stored Procedures
    • Cost Optimization
    • Performance Optimization

Reach out over email if you’d like help taking the mystery out of your data platform.

Web Design

Freelance Web Design Services

I enjoy helping (hourly) with all sorts of freelance web design services including:

  • Building your website from scratch (including lots of Wordpress experience)
  • Customize or tweak your website
  • Improve SEO on your site to improve your search engine performance

Contact

Email is the best way to get in touch with me.

Research Triangle, North Carolina
E-mail: z@charyriesland.com