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DataDream Labs

Will
Flowers

Hands-on engineering leader and backend/platform engineer. I build real-time systems and data platforms, and the quality practices that keep them running.

Open to senior/staff engineering and player-coach leadership roles. Taking select contract work.

Experience

Select a role to expand the full detail.

Jul 2025 – Sep 2026Pangia PassHead of Engineering (contract)Took a data-only eSIM service to an app-native calling, SMS, and phone-number platform live in the US, UK, and Australia.

Player-coach lead for the engineering team, and hands-on in the highest-risk systems. Team: 5–6 engineers

App Store Google Play

  • Co-built and shipped the iOS and Android apps (Expo/React Native) through the App Store and Google Play: account creation, eSIM purchase and installation, number purchase and provisioning, porting, and in-app calling and SMS.
  • Worked on multi-provider telephony across Telnyx SIP, DirectConnect, and CloudNumbering: provider abstraction and failover, number provisioning, SMS, calling, and country-specific porting workflows.
  • Helped bring real-time mobile voice to production, working through SMS delivery, synchronization, push notifications, and background-app reliability.
  • Led the Flask-to-FastAPI migration and Terraform-based infrastructure work, and established automated test execution in CI.
  • Hardened the backend: authentication and authorization, secrets management, webhook verification, rate limiting, encryption, and GDPR privacy controls.
  • Set technical direction through design and code reviews, regular 1:1s, release ownership, and an explicit testing culture.
  • Introduced BMAD and spec-driven delivery, and built the team's AI-agent pipeline that drafts, implements, and quality-gates sprint stories with people reviewing every step.
  • Led PostHog instrumentation across calls, SMS, authentication, KYC, purchases, and eSIM events to give the team a product and reliability measurement foundation.

Tools Python, FastAPI, Flask, TypeScript, React Native, Expo, SIP/VoIP, PostgreSQL, Supabase, Firebase, GCP (Cloud Run, App Engine), Terraform, GitHub Actions, PostHog, Stripe

Nov 2023 – Feb 2025Cigna HealthcareSenior Software Engineer (contract)Migrated 1,000+ analysts and data scientists, with their workflows and data, from Domino Data Labs to Databricks in six months, avoiding relicensing costs.

Platform engineer on the data-science platform team. Team: 12

  • Worked hundreds of support, feature, and integration requests from internal users, and set up onboarding, permissions, and data and volume transfers for the new platform.
  • Got SolasAI, a third-party risk and equity-metrics vendor, running inside Databricks, unblocking a key internal business partner that funded the team's work.
  • Restored an Ansible build process that had been out of commission for eight months, smoothing the move away from Domino.
  • Fixed bugs in a critical legacy Scala codebase that most of the team couldn't get to build.
  • Managed the AWS infrastructure behind platform monitoring and uptime, and contributed to integrating an internal modeling pipeline with Databricks Lakehouse Monitoring.
  • Regularly mentored teammates on problems where I had more depth.

Tools AWS (EC2, Lambda, CloudWatch, RDS, Secrets Manager, S3), Ansible, Bash, Databricks, Domino Data Labs, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Python, Scala, Spark, Terraform

Dec 2022 – Nov 2023DataDream LabsFounder, software engineering consultantRescued a failing production crawler and took a single-user prototype to a secure, multi-user cloud product.

Independent consultant, owning each engagement end to end. Team: Client teams of up to 5

Touchpoints: production crawler rescue

Their production web-crawling software had a mission-critical bug they couldn't reproduce. I reproduced it locally, fixed it, added logging and configuration so the next failure would be easier to diagnose, and deployed the improved version within two weeks of development time: processing twice as fast at half the run cost.

PredxBio: from local prototype to cloud product

Took a local, single-user Flask and React application to a scalable, multi-user deployment on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Added token-based authentication with Cognito and Amplify, group-based authorization tied to S3 paths, managed subdomains and certificates, and a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner for CI.

Tools Python, Flask, React, AWS (Amplify, Certificate Manager, Cognito, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM, S3), GitHub Actions, Gunicorn

Oct 2021 – Oct 2022Apeel SciencesBackend Software EngineerBuilt the order-data pipeline that let finance close the books faster after each quarter.

Owned the pipeline from raw ingestion to reporting. Team: 20

  • Books were taking months to close. I built ingestion for the two largest customers' disparate order data, and designed reusable classes so new customers could onboard easily.
  • Owned data from raw ingestion to Sisense dashboards through batch ETL jobs with 95%+ unit-test coverage, integrated data-quality assertions, and 95%+ uptime.
  • Contributed to the core product backend (REST APIs and relational data work) through stories and code and design reviews.
  • Deployed jobs to AWS with Terraform.

Tools Python, Django, Django REST Framework, PostgreSQL, Pandas, AWS S3, Terraform, GitLab, OAuth2, SFTP, Sisense

Jun 2018 – Sep 2021Red HatSenior Data Scientist and Python Backend EngineerTechnical leader on a propensity-modeling program behind $10M+ in bookings and about $100M in pipeline.

Technical leader on a 20-person cross-departmental program, especially abstraction, configuration, and testing. Team: 20 (propensity program), 4 (analytics)

  • Built a home-grown propensity-modeling system (mostly XGBoost) predicting customer behavior from internal and external data, giving Sales and Marketing actionable insight.
  • Iterated on and regularly deployed 50+ models within a suite of 200+, with accuracy gains of 50%+ on some. Results piloted to 400+ users with a statistically significant improvement over previous solutions.
  • Led the move from Domino Data Labs' proprietary version control to an internal GitLab, with tutorials for about 20 people: branching, peer review, change history, and releases.
  • Stood up CI with GitLab CI and Domino, and bolted Great Expectations and MLflow onto the platform for experiment management and automated data-quality testing.
  • Introduced configuration files and a normalized data model, which increased code reuse and unified the underlying sources of truth.
  • Moved large data artifacts out of the repo into S3, speeding up container boot times; managed the team's Docker and Linux builds.
  • Earlier, built the data-processing layer and API behind a Marketing and Sales dashboard reaching 1,000+ internal users: 12x faster than the original algorithm, scalable on OpenShift, with 85% test coverage in CI. It launched on time, within a few months of my start.

Tools Python, SQL, XGBoost, scikit-learn, SHAP, Ray Tune, Pandas, Airflow, MLflow, Great Expectations, Domino Data Labs, AWS (S3, Redshift), GitLab, Flask, Celery, MongoDB, MySQL, OpenShift

Dec 2017 – Jun 2018Pathos EthosSoftware Developer (contract)Led back-end development of a Rails job board for the agency's most important client.

Back-end lead while traveling and working remotely. Team: 7

  • Learned Ruby and Rails and was contributing within weeks.
  • Automated the deployment pipeline and managed DevOps, making releases faster and less error-prone.
  • Led training and onboarding sessions and interviewed candidates for hire.

Tools Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Heroku, AWS S3, JavaScript, jQuery

Mar 2017 – Nov 2017Cisco SystemsAutomation Engineer (contract)Automated testing of new products for large, customer-specific network setups.

Solution Validation Services team. Team: About 30

  • Contributed to a framework that dynamically automates testing of networks and topologies.
  • Helped define the Git workflow, and implemented Git hooks and CI for client- and server-side QA.
  • Onboarded eight new teammates as the team grew from 12 to 30 in a few months, and started a biweekly lunch skill-share.

Tools Python 3, Docker, GitLab, REST, Cisco L2/L3 networking

Mar 2016 – Feb 2017Videntity SystemsPython Developer (contract)Built Medicare data pipelines for CMS's Quality Payment Program.

Backend developer. Team: 2, plus 4 client-side

  • Built a weekly pipeline parsing 75+ GB of provider XML into CSV and PostgreSQL, served as JSON through a Django REST API.
  • Added unit tests, Python 3 compatibility, and CLI tools for public Medicare provider data.
  • Set up Jenkins CI for existing Python and Django projects, and JSON Schema validation for the FHIR healthcare data format.

Tools Python, Django, PostgreSQL, Jenkins, FHIR, AWS

Skills & tools

21 skills across 8 roles, plus 117 tools and packagesSearchable and sortable, with proof for every dot

Where each skill was used in production. Years are computed from role dates, not self-rated; hover, tap, or tab to a dot for the proof. Select a role to read it in full.

Sort
Skills (rows) used in each role (columns), oldest role first, with computed years and evidence level
SkillVidentity Systems2016–17Cisco Systems2017Pathos Ethos2017–18Red Hat2018–21Apeel Sciences2021–22DataDream Labs2022–23Cigna Healthcare2023–25Pangia Pass2025–26Evidence
Backend & platform
Python (opens project site)10 yrsDeep production
Web frameworks (FastAPI (opens project site), Flask (opens project site), Django (opens project site), Rails (opens project site))8 yrsDeep production
SQL & PostgreSQL (opens project site)7 yrsDeep production
Cloud: AWS (opens project site)8 yrsStrong production
Cloud: GCP (opens project site)1.2 yrsCurrent specialization
Infrastructure as code (Terraform (opens project site))3.7 yrsStrong production
CI/CD & test automation10 yrsDeep production
Containers (Docker (opens project site), Kubernetes (opens project site), OpenShift (opens project site))5 yrsStrong production
Security & auth2.2 yrsStrong production
Data & ML
ETL & data pipelines5 yrsDeep production
Databricks (opens project site) & Spark (opens project site)1.3 yrsStrong production
ML models & MLOps3.3 yrsStrong production
Data quality5 yrsStrong production
Mobile & real-time
React Native (opens project site) & Expo (opens project site)1.2 yrsCurrent specialization
Telephony, SIP/VoIP & SMS1.2 yrsCurrent specialization
JavaScript (opens project site) & TypeScript (opens project site)2.8 yrsStrong production
Leadership & delivery
Team leadership5 yrsStrong production
Mentoring & onboarding7 yrsDeep production
Spec-driven development (BMAD framework (opens project site))1.2 yrsCurrent specialization
AI-agent pipelines1.2 yrsCurrent specialization
Product analytics1.2 yrsCurrent specialization

Proof Hover or tap any dot.

All 117 skills, tools and packages, A–Z

How I work

Player-coach
I review plans and code, hold 1:1s, and set release and testing standards, then pick up the hardest ticket.
Quality as a system
CI gates, test-first changes, and security controls that make "ready to ship" a visible fact rather than a feeling.
AI-assisted, human-reviewed
I built the agent pipeline my last team used to draft, implement, and gate sprint work, with people reviewing every step.

Contract work

DataDream Labs is how I take on focused engagements alongside, or between, full-time roles.

Start with an email describing the problem: will@datadreamlabs.com

Writing

Also

Recognition
15+ formal peer shout-outs; two hiring panels and ten interviews given; onboarded or mentored 25+ people.
Conferences
KDD (2018–2020), O'Reilly Strata Data (2019), All Things Open (2017, 2018, 2023).
Education
B.A. Mathematics, minor in Mathematical Decision Sciences (Statistics), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012–2015.