About

Nearly thirty years from the first system to this one.

Kenneth M. Davis began formal study in information technology in 1999 and took his first lead engineering role in May 2002 at National Creditors Connection in Lake Forest, California. That is the start of a run that now covers almost a quarter century of shipping software, and close to three decades in the industry. Ark Cloud Tech is the consulting practice built on it. He lives in McKinney, Texas.

July 2024 — present

Plano, Texas · On site

PennyMac

Senior application developer. PennyMac is a U.S. mortgage lender and loan servicer. Kenneth works with the I.T. product and infrastructure teams on loan-servicing tools being prepared for a SaaS and private-label product on AWS.

The day-to-day runs the full stack: JavaScript and C# on the interface, SQL schema and scripts in the data layer, APIs, Lambda, and S3, and the hard bugs that only show up in New Relic. He writes and reviews code with onshore and offshore teammates and stays with a change from the requirements doc through the CI/CD pipeline.

In an internal hackathon he used Amazon Bedrock and Meta’s Llama 3.2 to review Five9 call transcripts. The aim was practical: fewer compliance misses, sales opportunities the team had walked past, and standout service calls worth using in training. In July 2024, on site, he completed Amazon’s generative A.I. coursework — Bedrock, Amazon Q, foundations of prompt engineering, and how to plan a generative A.I. project.

January 2017 — March 2024

Remote · Senior contractor

Visual Embassy

Seven years of client work delivered through Visual Embassy, across community stacks — Python, Node, Go, MongoDB — and the Microsoft stack of SQL Server, .NET, and C#. The engagements below are the ones that carry the A.I. and cloud story.

Fannie Mae

Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association, supports liquidity in the U.S. mortgage market. Kenneth helped lead a move of Python, Tableau, and Power BI reporting off an on-premises Oracle backend and onto PostgreSQL in AWS. He defined how the Python ecosystem would do the processing, and he prototyped a migration-documentation tool so stakeholders could see progress while the integration was still underway.

FaceFirst

FaceFirst builds facial-recognition technology for security operations. During the COVID years Kenneth worked with data scientists on facemask-compatible recognition, using Python and PyTorch. The front end was Angular 10 and React. Request handling sat on .NET Web API, feeding an analytics dashboard used to identify crime and the people responsible.

Liberty Dental Plan

Liberty Dental Plan is a dental-benefits organization. With its data-science and business-intelligence group, Kenneth built a visual fraud-detection tool and converted Jupyter machine-learning notebooks into something operations could run, aimed at keeping members and cutting fraud. Azure, SSIS, and Blazor supplied pieces of the visualization.

Secure One Financial

He led development of a loan-modification workflow manager and a call-center analytics platform, including the Salesforce dashboards beside them. A later pass put a React interface on MongoDB and a large language model so the center could see agent performance and customer satisfaction, and lose fewer customers.

Toyota Racing Development

Toyota Racing Development is Toyota’s motorsports and performance arm. The team extended Athena, the real-time NASCAR tracking and analytics platform, by moving the backend to AWS Lambda, with Node in the middle and React on the front.

Ingram Micro

Ingram Micro is a global technology distributor. Working with data scientists in the business-intelligence department, Kenneth turned sales and logistics models out of Jupyter notebooks and into production, and guided a data-driven sales-forecasting tool from early sketches to a proof of concept shown to BI leadership.

Puffy

With William Andreozzi, formerly of Weedmaps, he added delivery tracking to Puffy’s social mobile app. The interface was Angular. AWS Lambda and DynamoDB carried a live status and map so a delivery read as a timeline, not a ticket number.

January 2015 — April 2017

Irvine, California

CoStar Group

Senior software engineer. CoStar Group is the commercial real-estate information company behind Apartments.com. Kenneth built and maintained API layers and the MVC .NET, HTML5, and JavaScript pages in front of them, with Web API, Entity Framework, and SQL Server behind. Before the Apartments.com launch he spent much of his time on mobile front-end bugs. The property had to stay fast at peaks above a million visitors a day.

He also built A.I.-augmented FFmpeg capture during meetings. The team credited that work with saving more than 100 accumulated developer and quality-control hours a month.

April 2012 — January 2015

Garden Grove, California

Teletrac

Senior lead software engineer. Teletrac makes fleet-tracking and telematics products. Kenneth led the U.S. team on Fleet Director 10, the flagship enterprise fleet product, using GIS and LabVIEW to extend mapping and data acquisition. He also worked with the business-intelligence group on an HTML5 reporting portal, and with Fleet Connect on Microsoft Web API integrations.

He designed a JSON protocol, with MongoDB and RabbitMQ, between the mobile app and in-vehicle devices, and a LabVIEW test framework for the in-vehicle unit and its JBUS interface. Node sat in that integration. The point of the test rig was a shorter path to market.

June 2011 — April 2012

Lake Forest, California

U.S. Residential Services

Lead software architect for the buyer-portal product, and the managing lead for an offshore team in India and another in Latvia. The rhythm was Scrum: restate the objective, break it into tasks a developer could finish, and write code himself when that was the fastest way through.

April 2010 — June 2011

Newport Beach, California

AutopartsDealer

Senior e-commerce developer. Most of the tooling ran on AWS, especially crawlers. In the first year the company moved from a couple of hundred hits a day and under $50,000 a month toward about 10,000 hits a day and around $1 million a month. At one point the team was standing up three to five new scrapers a week, plus product-analysis and marketing tools.

A separate C# and .NET machine-learning system found usable images for more than 500,000 products. That work was part of a roughly 220 percent revenue gain, from about $300,000 to about $950,000 a month.

August 2005 — December 2009

Lake Forest, California, and the Philippines

Tri-Emerald Financial

Software architect and I.T. director. Kenneth worked in the U.S. and in the Philippines with the CEO and an investor on the logistics of an offshore call center. The data backend was SQL Server, reached through a LINQ object layer. He designed crawlers and screen scrapers for marketing data, and predictive-dialing and lead-tracking software that later ran on Amazon EC2.

He was director of software development, with three direct reports, and director of marketing — about forty direct reports — until a manager was hired for that group. He completed a Predictive Index management course and ran one-to-one career conversations that tied a person’s goals to the team’s numbers and the company’s stated values.

An Asterisk telecom build cut marketing cost by about ten times, from roughly $40,000 a month to about $3,500, while throughput held or improved. That lowered the cost of each funding.

May 2002 — August 2005

Lake Forest, California

National Creditors Connection

Lead programmer analyst, and the start of the professional record. National Creditors Connection is a field-services company. Kenneth designed desktop tools in Windows Forms and web tools in classic ASP from requirements he gathered himself, and he automated Excel, Outlook, and the rest of Office with Visual Basic where the office already lived.

B2B integrations used PGP and, for particular clients, one-off cryptography. Shared Azure servers, XML, and SOAP web services carried the ETL. He then helped move the line-of-business application off UNIX and onto Windows: SQL Server, ASP, Visual Basic 6, Java, and eventually ASP.NET and C#.

The SQL Server migration, and a front end taken from classic ASP to .NET, JavaScript, jQuery, and CSS, is what let more than 600 field representatives across North America see their work manifests in real time. That system is the root of the later work: a business process, a database, and an interface someone in the field will actually open.

A.I. and data

  • Amazon Bedrock, Llama, and the ChatGPT API
  • Prompt engineering and generative-project planning
  • PyTorch, TensorFlow.js, neural nets, and GANs
  • Call analytics, fraud detection, forecasting, and vision
  • Python, Jupyter, Tableau, Power BI, and SSIS
  • Solana and Ethereum APIs on trading-tool work

Full stack and cloud

  • React, React Native, Angular, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
  • Node, Express, .NET, C#, Blazor, and MAUI
  • SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and GraphQL
  • AWS Lambda and S3, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud
  • Wireframes in Figma and Canva; architecture in Visio
  • LabVIEW, GIS, and vehicle data acquisition

Leadership

  • Director of software development and of marketing, Tri-Emerald
  • Offshore leads in India, Latvia, and the Philippines
  • U.S. team lead for Teletrac Fleet Director 10
  • Scrum, and the habit of writing the task so it can be finished
  • Predictive Index management training
  • Career conversations that line up person, team, and company

Education

ITT Technical Institute

Associate in Science, September 1999 — June 2003, Anaheim. Information technology, 96 units: architecture, operating systems, Visual Basic 6, GUI design, needs assessment, databases, networking, and technical writing. Electronic engineering, 36 units, including the lab work that proves the theory.

New Horizons

Certificate in T-SQL, July 2002, Anaheim. Course 2073, programming a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database: tables, triggers, procedures, functions, joins, and views.

Amazon Web Services

Building Generative AI Applications Using Amazon Bedrock, July 2024, on site at PennyMac in Plano. Introduction to generative A.I., Amazon Q Business, Amazon Bedrock, prompt engineering, and planning a generative A.I. project.

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