AI Pathfinder is my independent project on the side: a community and content platform for builders and business leaders using AI in their own products and businesses. I write up real use cases, share working demos, and publish what I've learned on my blog, on Substack, and eventually on a podcast.

• Building a community: Growing an audience of founders, product people, and business owners applying AI to real products. I share what worked, what didn't, and why.
• Content across a few channels: Long-form write-ups on aipathfinderllc.com, regular essays on Substack (@ericsippel1), with podcast and social content in the works.
• A live example, Park Whisperer: A multi-cloud platform (AWS, Azure, GCP) I built on my own time and publish openly as a working example of agentic AI, forecasting, and RAG. It runs for under $100 a month.
• More use cases: Research automation, cloud governance patterns, and migration analysis approaches, published as examples for other builders to learn from and adapt.
• The voice behind it: I show my actual work, including cost and trade-offs, so other builders can learn from what I've already tried.

This work is separate from my advisory role at Rackspace: different audience (independent builders and business owners vs. enterprise clients), different purpose (content and community vs. paid delivery).

I'm a Principal Advisory Consultant in Rackspace's Public Cloud Advisory practice, covering the full lifecycle of an enterprise cloud engagement: discovery, architecture and solution design, SOW authoring, and delivery, for clients in healthcare, aerospace, insurance, financial services, real estate, and technology. I also started Rackspace's Google Cloud Center of Excellence.

• Architecture & solution design: Discovery and architecture workshops, Well-Architected reviews, and migration roadmap design across AWS, Azure, and GCP, turning infrastructure complexity into phased delivery plans and executive-ready business cases.
• SOW & proposal authoring: Author SOWs and proposals for enterprise pursuits, covering technical scope, TCO/FinOps modeling, and competitive positioning.
• Migration & modernization: Infrastructure rationalization, 6R disposition strategy, dependency mapping, and migration wave planning across energy, healthcare, insurance, and financial services.
• Cloud-portable governance platform: Deployed an existing governance library on both AWS (CloudFormation, DynamoDB) and Azure (Bicep, Cosmos DB) with zero changes to the business logic.
• AI-assisted tooling: Built a multi-agent pipeline that analyzed a 36-application clinical portfolio in under 5 hours for about $24 in compute, plus a governance platform checking code against 10 regulatory frameworks (NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, EU AI Act, HIPAA, SOC2, FedRAMP).
• Customer relationships: Direct C-suite relationships, workshop facilitation, and business-aligned cloud roadmaps across dozens of enterprise engagements.

Client industries: Aerospace & Defense, Healthcare & MedTech, Financial Services, Insurance, Retail, Government, and more.

Senior program manager delivering large-scale DevOps, RPA, and software development programs across enterprise accounts. Primary accounts: T-Mobile and DexYP/Thryv.

• T-Mobile (DevOps Scrum Master): Led 4 scrum teams across Customer Contact Center, Voice/IVR, and Social & Messaging products with 30+ offshore engineers. Contributed to Cisco UCCE deployment and 2 RPA projects.
• Account Growth: Grew T-Mobile contract from $800K to $2.5M annually over 3 years. Monthly business reviews at Senior Manager level; quarterly reviews at VP level.
• RPA Program Architect: Created UiPath POC, stood up DevOps team to deploy RPA infrastructure, and achieved close to 4,000 hours saved annually.
• Operations Manager: Led an offshore team covering 300+ hours a week of operations, including alert management, change management, DevOps engineering, and monitoring optimization.
• DexYP / Thryv (Senior PM): DevOps Scrum Master for Salesforce.com modernization and custom telephony application development. 8 onshore + 24 offshore engineers, $4.2M contract (annualized).
• Global Program Manager: Scrum-of-scrums across US, UK, India, Australia, China teams on a $5M annual software development initiative, including AWS S3 cloud migration and China-firewall software delivery.
• Cybersecurity Incident Response: Led recovery for a global non-profit that lost its entire Windows domain to ransomware. Stabilized the network, recovered domain controllers, and designed new architecture. ($800K engagement)

Manager in the technology consulting practice, responsible for Texas Region sales pipeline and national financial services advisory engagements.

• Revenue Growth: Grew Texas Region revenue from ~$500K to $2M+ in 18 months through managed services solution design and sales engineering.
• National Financial Services SME: Principal engineer for financial services and community banking engagements, covering virtual CIO, IT operations manager, strategic assessments, ITSM lead, and security/cyber advisor roles. Clients were subject to OCC/FDIC/FFIEC regulatory oversight.
• Cloud / Hybrid Infrastructure Architect: Designed workload migration strategies for complex enterprise clients, determining cloud vs. on-premises disposition and building end-state architecture roadmaps.
• Management Consulting: Technology and process evaluations for C-suite audiences, covering cloud strategy, ERP/CRM recommendations, technical debt reduction, and staffing decisions.
• Cybersecurity Architecture: Infrastructure expertise for incident response and cybersecurity initiative recommendations in collaboration with privacy/security teams.

Client-facing technology executive responsible for a portfolio of banks and healthcare organizations on the company's Citrix Private Cloud platform. All clients subject to strict regulatory requirements (OCC, FDIC, FFIEC, HIPAA) with multiple audit and exam events per year.

• Cloud Services Architect / Operations Manager: Responsible for all Citrix Private Cloud customers, navigating regulatory audits and exam certifications.
• Advisory / Virtual CIO: Assisted financial institutions with Technology Steering Committee decisions, reported to Executive Office, and went on record for audit/exam certifications and remediation.
• Book of Business: Assigned 20+ clients ($4.5M, 40% of annual revenue). Monitored SLAs, conducted monthly service reviews, and managed continuous project delivery. Delivered $12M in renewal TCV over 18 months.
• Premier Account Management Program: Established structured program including KPI measurement, continuous improvement framework, and "referenceable client" quality standard.
• Sales Engineering: Sales engineering for ITSM and Cloud solutions; contributed to channel engagement and industry events.

Director responsible for client services, engineering team management, and cloud architecture across the company's Texas client base.

• Revenue Results: Account management program drove 27% increase in recurring revenue contracts, 40% reduction in issues escalated to management, and 100% YoY increase in project revenue.
• Engineering Manager: Responsible for ~25 engineers, including recruiting, performance reviews, and team satisfaction improvements.
• Cloud Services Architect: Designed and optimized Private Cloud and Hybrid Infrastructure solutions with continuous improvement strategies.
• Project Revenue Growth: Grew project revenue from ~$400K to $750K annualized within 2 years through structured opportunity identification and senior engineering support program.
• Sales Engineering: Solution architecture and scoping for top-tier customers and prospects, $20K–$2M contract range, engaged by VP of Sales.

11-year career at national managed IT services firm, advancing from senior engineer to national program architect and executive-office-selected strategic leader.

Roles held: Program Architect "Project Desk" · Manager, Training/Strategic Solutions · Engineering Manager (Central Region) · Principal Consultant · Senior Consultant

• National Project Desk Program: Architected and managed the national Project Desk. Grew project revenue from $1.2M to $1.7M and maintained an average pipeline of $2.7M (services) plus $3M (procurement). 525 proposals per quarter.
• Strategic Solutions (Executive Office): Selected by Executive Office to head "Strategic Solutions" team of highest-level engineers, defining technology standards and best practices for 700 engineers companywide.
• Regional Engineering Manager: Dual-role responsibility for regional project revenue (20% total) and engineering team across 8 markets, ~40 engineers / 4 Principal-level. National and Executive Office reporting.
• Principal Consultant Program (National): Chosen to develop and lead the national Principal Consultant Program, achieving $1.7M in project revenue growth in year one.
• Training Program Architect: Inaugural member of the national Training department. Defined technical and process training requirements, led LMS selection and deployment, and ran the engineering round table.
• San Francisco / Sacramento Market: Increased project revenue pipeline from 11% to over 23%, the largest market in the company.
• M&A Integration: Served on the first deployment team after each deal closed, handling HR onboarding, systems training, process documentation, and multi-month integration follow-through.