Eric Sippel

Principal AI Engineer & Cloud Solutions Architect · Enterprise Advisory
30 Years Experience AI-First Builder Governance & Compliance

AI-first engineer and cloud architect with 30 years of enterprise delivery experience — from managed services and cloud migrations to production AI platforms built entirely with AI-driven tooling. I design and ship production systems at a pace that once required full engineering teams: an agentic cloud migration analysis platform for 36 clinical applications cost $24 in AI compute; a solo-built AI platform runs across three clouds for under $100/month. My differentiator is the combination of deep architectural judgment — governance frameworks, regulated-industry compliance, defensible audit trails — with the ability to iterate an idea from sketch to production in days, not quarters, then operate it reliably at scale. I have led enterprise advisory engagements across healthcare, financial services, and telecommunications; managed teams of 40+; and held sales pipeline responsibility exceeding $5M annually. I bring the same rigor to a 13-step AI content pipeline as to an FFIEC-compliant virtual CIO engagement.

AI Engineering & Architecture
Agentic AI pipelines · Multi-agent orchestration · LLM provenance governance · Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) · AI-driven IDE development · AWS Bedrock · Azure OpenAI · Claude · LangChain
Cloud Architecture (Multi-Cloud)
AWS (IaC, Bedrock, Lambda, Step Functions, S3, CloudFormation) · Azure (Functions, Container Apps, Cosmos DB, Bicep) · GCP (BigQuery, Cloud Run, Cloud Scheduler) · Flex Consumption · Serverless
Governance & Regulated Industries
NIST AI RMF · ISO 42001 · EU AI Act · HIPAA · SOX · FFIEC · OCC/FDIC · SDLC gate enforcement · Compliance artifact generation · Audit trail design · Virtual CIO
Enterprise Advisory & Sales
Infrastructure rationalization · 6R migration planning · Cloud readiness assessment · FinOps / TCO modeling · Application dependency mapping · Migration wave planning · Sales pipeline $5M+
Program & Delivery Management
DevOps / Agile Scrum Master · Offshore team management (30+ engineers) · Waterfall + Agile hybrid · Jira · Azure DevOps · Program architecture · KPI / SLA design · 20+ yrs. delivery
People Leadership & Training
Engineering Manager (40+ reports) · Coach & Mentor · Training program architect · Campus hiring & mentoring · Matrix resourcing (US, UK, India, Australia, China) · Executive reporting
Rackspace Technology
Feb 2022 – Present
Remote (US) · Public Cloud Advisory Practice
Principal Consultant — Advisory (AI Engineering & Cloud Architecture)
  • AI-First delivery model: Designed and built production AI systems using AI-driven IDEs and agentic tooling — shipping in days rather than quarters, enabling real-time iteration with enterprise clients.
  • Cloud Migration Analysis Platform: Architected a multi-agent AI pipeline (AWS Bedrock, Claude Sonnet, Python) that processed a 36-application clinical portfolio — 408 VMs — in under 5 hours for $24 in AI compute. Every recommendation provenance-tagged and validated by 22 deterministic governance rules; zero hallucinations in numeric outputs.
  • AI Governance & Compliance Platform: Built an enterprise-grade platform scanning codebases across 10 regulatory frameworks (NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, EU AI Act, HIPAA, SOC2, FedRAMP) — generating 9 artifact types (Model Cards, DPIA, Risk Assessments, Bias Audits) and enforcing 5 SDLC gate stages.
  • Pre-Sales Intelligence Agent: Delivered an agentic research system producing 13-section intelligence briefings in ~8 minutes from a single company name, via 5 live data tools (LinkedIn, financials, news, domain analysis, executive tracking). Zero manual research steps.
  • Datacenter Migration Simulation (Digital Twin): Designed a dual-cloud (AWS + Azure) simulation engine ingesting enterprise application portfolios, building dependency graphs via Cosmos DB Gremlin, and running a 5-agent swarm for 6R disposition with confidence scores and TCO estimates.
  • Cloud-Portable Governance Platform (AWS + Azure): Deployed an existing governance library to both AWS (5 CloudFormation stacks, 17 API routes, 7 DynamoDB tables) and Azure (4 Bicep modules, 7 Cosmos containers) — zero business logic changed, 136 tests preserved.
  • Advisory consulting (core practice): Infrastructure rationalization · Cloud readiness planning · Application stack mapping · Migration wave planning · Modern operating model design · FinOps/TCO planning · DR maturity · DevSecOps maturity assessment.
SmarTek21
Jun 2017 – Feb 2022
Kirkland, WA / Texas Region (Remote) · IT Services & Consulting
Senior Program Manager
  • 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, 2 RPA projects, and technical debt backlogs. Toolset: Jira, Slack, Azure DevOps.
  • Account Management: Grew T-Mobile contract from $800K to $2.5M annually over 3 years through opportunity identification and pipeline growth. Delivered monthly business reviews to 4 Senior Managers and quarterly reviews at VP level.
  • Operations Manager / Service Delivery: Led offshore team across 300+ hours/week of operations coverage — alert management, Change Management, DevOps engineering, and monitoring optimization.
  • RPA Program Architect: Created UiPath POC, stood up DevOps team to deploy RPA infrastructure, and achieved close to 4,000 hours saved annually through successful RPA implementation.
  • DexYP / Thryv (Senior Program Manager): 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 their entire Windows Domain to ransomware — stabilized network, recovered Domain Controllers, developed new architecture. ($800K engagement)
RSM US LLP
Jun 2015 – Jun 2017
Houston, TX / Texas Region / National · Management Consulting
Manager, IT Infrastructure & Cloud
  • Sales & Solution Architecture: Texas Region sales pipeline responsibility; grew regional 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 / community banking engagements — virtual CIO, IT Operations Manager, Strategic Assessments, ITSM Lead, Security/Cyber Advisor.
  • 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 — viable cloud strategies, ERP/CRM recommendations, technical debt reduction, staffing decisions.
  • Cybersecurity Architecture: Infrastructure expertise for incident response and cybersecurity initiative recommendations in collaboration with privacy/security teams.
D+H (now Finastra)
Jul 2013 – Jun 2015
Dallas, TX / National · Financial Technology
Client Technology Officer / Relationship Manager
  • Cloud Services Architect / Operations Manager: Responsible for Citrix Private Cloud customers — all with strict regulatory requirements (banks & healthcare) — navigating multiple audit and exam events per year.
  • 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.
  • ITSM Program Manager: Assigned book of 20+ clients ($4.5M, 40% of annual revenue), monitoring SLAs, conducting monthly service reviews, and managing continuous project delivery. Delivered $12M in renewal TCV over 18 months.
  • Sales / Account Management: Sales engineering for ITSM and Cloud solutions; contributed to channel engagement and industry events.
  • Premier Account Management Program Architect: Established structured program including KPI measurement, continuous improvement framework, and "referenceable client" quality standard.
ERGOS Technology Partners
Nov 2011 – Jul 2013
Houston, TX / Texas Region · IT Services
Director of Client Services
  • Account Management Program Architect: Built relationship program resulting in a 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 across the client base, including recruiting, performance reviews, and team satisfaction improvements.
  • Cloud Services Architect: Designed and optimized Private Cloud and Hybrid Infrastructure solutions, evaluated real-time performance, and implemented continuous improvement strategies.
  • Project Business Program Architect: 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.
All Covered (Kforce Company)
Jul 2000 – Nov 2011
Seattle, WA / San Francisco / Houston / National · Managed IT Services (11 years)
Multiple Roles: Manager → Principal Consultant
Program Architect "Project Desk" · Manager Training/Strategic Solutions · Engineering Manager (Central Region) · Principal Consultant · Senior Consultant
  • National Project Desk Program: Architected and managed national Project Desk program — grew project revenue from $1.2M to $1.7M, maintained average pipeline of $2.7M (services) + $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 with direct 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 — achieved $1.7M project revenue growth in year one.
  • Training Program Architect: Inaugural national Training department member — defined technical and process training requirements, LMS selection and deployment, engineering round table leadership.
  • Merger & Acquisition Integration: Served as first deployment team upon deal closing — HR onboarding, systems training, process documentation, and multi-month integration follow-through.
  • San Francisco / Sacramento Market: Increased project revenue pipeline from 11% average to over 23% — largest market in the company.
AWS DevOps Professional 2022
AWS Solutions Architect Associate 2022
AWS Cloud Practitioner 2022
GCP Associate Cloud Engineer 2022
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals 2022
Professional Scrum Master I Scrum.org
Microsoft MCSE 2003
AI / ML: AWS Bedrock · Azure OpenAI · Claude · LangChain · LightGBM · Prophet · ElevenLabs · Phi-3 Mini
Cloud: AWS (Lambda, Step Functions, CloudFormation, Bedrock) · Azure (Functions, Container Apps, Cosmos DB, Bicep, SWA) · GCP (BigQuery, Cloud Run)
Data: PostgreSQL + pgvector · Cosmos DB · BigQuery · Redis · Azure AI Search
Languages: Python 3.11 · TypeScript · SQL · Bash
DevOps: GitHub Actions · Docker · Azure Container Apps · Terraform
Compliance: NIST AI RMF · ISO 42001 · EU AI Act · HIPAA · SOX · FFIEC
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25+ Production AI Case Studies — aipathfinderllc.com
Every bullet above is backed by a live case study with architecture diagrams, real cost data, and production deployment evidence. The portfolio spans enterprise AI delivery, a solo-built multi-cloud platform, and research explorations — all with working code, live demos, or deployed systems.