I’m Seth Handy — a software engineer in Charlotte, NC, with 13 years across data warehouse engineering, solution architecture, cloud engineering, full-stack development, and staff / tech lead roles. My journey started with video games, mainly with the video game series Halo. I loved that game and was adamantly curious on how it was made, how the enemy AI worked and how the graphics were made. After graduating highschool at 14, I started my first developer job at 15 working for a luxury real estate company and made web pages, salesforce applications and database management. Boring stuff these days but at that time, I thought MySQL was so cool.

Honestly, it’s still cool, especially when you see how much data engineering has evolved since then.

These days most of my work sits at the intersection of three things: cloud cost and performance engineering through infrastructure-as-code, event-driven distributed systems, and agentic AI wired into real production pipelines — not demos. I spend a lot of time automating my own infrastructure work with agents, which is also most of what I end up writing about here.

What I work on#

  • Cloud cost & performance via IaC. Led an x86 → arm64 Graviton migration driven through CDK and Terraform, cutting hosting costs 36% and improving performance 14% — about $13M/year in savings once other teams adopted the pattern across multiple orgs. I built an agentic workflow on Claude Opus to validate arm64-compatible wheels across targeted production Lambda Layers, application dependencies(mvn, npm, uv, gomod etc) with a reflection loop to catch deployment regressions, and cut token usage 60% along the way.

    Also built a custom agentic workflow for Code Review that branches off to multiple languages with their own rules and uses a custom _SKILL.md I made to cut token inference and usage. Some of the repos this agent runs on are massive monorepos(think FAANG or legacy apps where the word “tech debt” is foreign) and Copilot wouldn’t bother to analyze the entire repo for functionality that was already made and could be utilized in the current repo. With this agent I built, not only does it cut token costs by 62% but also runs extremely fast taking seconds for a review to be executed and finished. It then runs a 2nd pass to look for business logic discrepancies based on the JIRA/Rally ticket, the department’s goals and how the code addresses the story at hand.

  • High-volume data platforms. Cloud-native ELT pipelines ingesting 10TB+ daily into Snowflake, orchestrated with Python and Airflow at 99.9% reliability. Custom dbt macros enforcing primary-key integrity across multi-tenant sources, with dbt tests wired into CI/CD so anomalies never reach production.

  • Event-driven systems in Go. Physician referrals platform on Go, Kafka, MongoDB and EKS scaled past 200M messages/day at Centene, alongside enterprise FHIR applications serving 200M+ daily requests.

  • Making failures explain themselves. A self-diagnosing debug pipeline that fires targeted SQL diagnostics the moment a pipeline step fails — turning hours of manual investigation into a first-pass root cause that arrives with the alert.

  • Rescuing legacy systems. Zero-downtime migrations off legacy PHP into Go microservices, MS SQL → MySQL database migrations via DMS, and decomposing monoliths without stopping the business.

Before that#

  • Centene — Staff Software Engineer (2020–2023). Event-driven healthcare systems, FHIR/HL7 interoperability, micro-frontends via Module Federation, and E2E test automation.
  • Averro — Senior Software Engineer (2024). A Go rule engine processing 1M+ daily security alerts from Defender, Qualys and CrowdStrike, plus a B2B attack-surface management platform in Angular and Go.
  • ViscoSoft — Lead Engineer (2017–2020). Consumer sleep-metrics platform on Go and AWS Aurora, a Stripe-backed commerce platform, and leading a team of six building a React Native IoT app.
  • Ritz Marketing — Senior Software Engineer (2017).
  • Red Ventures — Software Engineer (2015–2017). SEO and paid-search platforms for enterprise clients.
  • Grand Estates Auction — Web Developer (2014–2015).

Toolbox#

Go, TypeScript, Python, Node.js, .NET Core · AWS, Azure, Terraform, AWS CDK · Kubernetes, Docker, Serverless · Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, MySQL, NoSQL, Redis · Angular, RxJS, React · agentic workflows, Claude and other LLM tooling · distributed systems, CI/CD, observability, automated testing

Education#

Cornell University — Engineering Leadership, minor in Computer Engineering (2020)

Elsewhere#