Tim Williams
Senior Backend Engineer · Data & AI
About
Backend-focused engineer building reliable services and data pipelines at SaaS scale. I design clear APIs, production-grade ETL/ELT on Azure, and Kubernetes-first microservices with strong CI/CD, observability, and testing. Comfortable across Python, C#, and Node — pragmatic, performance-minded, and delivery-oriented.
Experience
Lead Software Engineer / AI Engineer · Canopy
Remote
2023 — Present
- Own backend architecture for CRM + workflow features; designed clear service boundaries and APIs used by web and internal tools.
- Built Azure-based ETL/ELT (Blob ➜ Data Factory/Synapse/SQL) with incremental loading, idempotent backfills, and observability (logs/metrics/traces).
- Containerized Python microservices and scheduled jobs on Kubernetes; implemented secrets via Key Vault and environment-specific config.
- Drove CI/CD (Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions) with preview environments, automated testing, and schema/version checks for safe deploys.
- Partnered with Product on requirements and delivery; mentored engineers on testing patterns, code reviews, and on-call hygiene.
AI/ML Engineer (Platform Integrations) · Marketstar
Remote
2022 — 2023
- Integrated LLM-powered summarization and insights into internal management apps; shipped reliable prompt/response pipelines with auditability.
- Built an email intelligence dashboard (thread clustering, action extraction, follow-up suggestions) with service guards and rate limiting.
- Prototyped multi-modal and fine-tuning workflows; stood up GPU-backed training/test queues on K8s for repeatable experiments.
Senior Data Engineer · Marketstar
Salt Lake City, UT
2020 — 2022
- Implemented robust ingestion patterns (CDC/incremental) with Data Factory and orchestrated transforms into a governed warehouse.
- Optimized heavy queries and indexing strategies in SQL Server/Synapse; significantly reduced runtime and compute cost.
- Authored internal SDK/utilities to standardize pipeline scaffolding, configuration, and error handling.
Projects
Direct-to-Provider Email/Calendar/Contacts SDK
Rebuilt a Nylas-style SDK for Google, Microsoft, iCloud, and IMAP using RxJava 1.3 + Vert.x; microservice-ready with backoff, retries, and typed models.
Questionnaire ➜ CRM Sync (Tax SaaS)
Diffs client-submitted questionnaire data against CRM records (e.g., address/phone), proposes updates, and lets staff approve one-click merges.
GPU Training Cluster
Kubernetes GPU nodes for fine-tuning domain models; queue-based job runner with metrics/traces, artifact versioning, and reproducible seeds.
.sav Structure Discovery Pod
K8s pod that inspects SPSS .sav files to infer schema/structure for downstream pipelines; exposes results via API and dashboard.