LIAM T. SARGENT

Engineering leader who still ships code. Platform, data and applied AI by day; realtime audio by night.

I lead software engineering at Federated Auto Parts, where a small, focused team builds the platform behind a member-owned auto parts network: the order gateway, the Kubernetes platform, the data lake, and the AI products on top of it.

Outside work I run Zip Technologies, my studio for audio and infrastructure R&D.

Before that I built security and cloud tooling at Cloudera and infrastructure at startups. B.S. Computer Science, James Madison University. Based in Virginia.

Reach me at liam@ziptech.io · github.com/themailman05

Resume

WORK

Since 2023 I've turned a consultant-run IT shop into an in-house engineering team and a platform the company owns end to end.

Platform modernization

Moved the whole product portfolio off hand-managed EC2 and AWS CodeBuild onto Kubernetes (EKS), built by GitHub Actions on self-hosted runners and defined in Terraform.

  • The hard part was Windows: legacy .NET Framework apps, a point-of-sale system and vendor gateways now run as Windows containers on Kubernetes Windows nodes, with supervised boot scripts that let the scheduler restart them safely.
  • Release time for the legacy catalog fell 71%, from 28 to 8 minutes.
  • Production runs on a private-endpoint cluster reached through a self-healing bastion tunnel, with AWS primary and GCP failover.
  • Observability and on-call from scratch: Grafana metrics and logs, alerting, PagerDuty.

EKS · GKE · Terraform · GitHub Actions (ARC) · Kustomize · Skaffold · crane · Vault · Grafana · PagerDuty

Order gateway

The API that connects member stores, shops and partner systems. It translates six-plus ordering protocols into one and carries millions of orders a year at 99.99% uptime.

  • Doubles as an OpenID Connect identity provider, so a signed-in user can federate straight into AWS with short-lived, tenant-scoped credentials.
  • Vendor integrations are decoupled through Redis streams, so a slow partner can't stall the request path.

Python · MySQL · MongoDB · Redis · OIDC/JWT

Data lake

Built from zero: Apache Iceberg on S3, queried through Athena, orchestrated by Airflow, fed by batch and Redpanda streams in a bronze/silver/gold layout.

  • Demand forecasting with LightGBM quantile models, plus margin, interchange and lost-sales models for purchasing decisions.
  • Things I learned the hard way: Lake Formation grants bind to the table resource, so DROP + CREATE silently strips them (rebuild with DELETE + INSERT instead); Athena caps an Iceberg INSERT at 100 open partition writers, so big backfills get chunked.

Iceberg · Athena · Glue · Lake Formation · Airflow · Redpanda · Superset · PostgreSQL

Applied AI: Insight

An analytics agent, launched in 2026, that answers business owners' purchasing questions in plain English by writing and running SQL against the data lake.

  • Tenant isolation is enforced by the data plane, not the prompt: each user's token is exchanged for an AWS role whose Lake Formation row filters only expose that tenant's rows.
  • Automated conformance tests prove the denials, and every agent run is traced for evaluation.

LLM tool use · AWS STS web identity · Lake Formation · Dart · Flutter

LAB

Smaller experiments, open-source work and tools.

shoestring

One command rents the cheapest suitable GPU on the Akash marketplace, loads a model and serves it behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, optionally reachable only over your Tailscale network. Measured: a 27B coding model for about $0.16 an hour, serving in about 6 minutes.

Python · Akash · vLLM/llama.cpp · Tailscale

L'Automatique

A harness that runs Claude Code in a retry loop against external checks until everything passes or a safety limit trips. Specs go in, working software comes out, with Braintrust tracing every attempt.

Python · Claude Code · Braintrust

ArpExcel

A VST3/AU MIDI arpeggiator where patterns are spreadsheet formulas: cell references, arithmetic and functions like MOD, IF and RANDOM drive each step.

C++ · JUCE

Akash market monitor

Kubernetes cronjobs that poll a decentralized GPU marketplace and place real canary deployments, to measure actual success rates and cost instead of trusting providers' self-reported uptime.

Python · Kubernetes CronJobs

Earlier

DCI Scores Bot

Reddit bot that posts Drum Corps International competition results. Python, PRAW, BeautifulSoup.

TakeRoot

Android app for sharing and finding homegrown produce in your community. BluestoneHacks 2015.

JMUSE Player

Browser audio player with FFT visualization for WAV, MP3, MP4, FLAC and OGG via the Web Audio API.

Syncspin

Collaborative party playlist with voting and recommendations. Best use of Intel Mashery API, HackGT 2014.

MUSIC

I make electronic music, which is why I keep building audio tools.

Album "Data Man, Sir" on Spotify.

Live sets on Twitch.