Emmett Walsh

Emmett Walsh

Enterprise Backend Consultant & AI Engineer
Ireland
English
Temporary Remote

About Me

Enterprise Backend Consultant with 20+ years of experience delivering resilient, high-throughput distributed systems across capital markets, global aviation and banking. Combining technical leadership with hands-on deliv…

Experience

AI Engineer

Independent · Castlebar , Mayo , Ireland
Jul 2025 - Present · 1 year 4 months

<p>Self-directed programme building production-grade GenAI systems with enterprise discipline; all code public on GitHub.</p><p> Built an AI-assisted trading signal engine that turns an analyst’s discretionary market notes into structured, tradeable signals, using a Node.js/TypeScript pipeline on LangChain and LangGraph.</p><p> First strategy (Trident) runs intraday mean-reversion across S&P 500 instruments (ES futures, CFDs, options).</p><p> Engineered for production reliability: Promptfoo eval regression tests, safety guardrails, GitHub Actions CI, PR-Agent code reviews and Docker distribution, all built spec-first with OpenSpec, from PRD through architecture to user stories.</p><p> Orchestrated a multi-model LLM pipeline in LangGraph.js: prompt-injection guardrail and routing, then X (Twitter) sentiment search (Grok) and a Java 25 signals service (Columbo) in parallel, then DeepSeek synthesis via OpenRouter.</p><p> Selected the routing model with an eval harness: Jev (TypeSafe AI) scored 29/30 vs 25–27/30 for AWS Nova Micro with zero missed searches; low-confidence routes fall back to running both branches.</p><p> Cut synthesis cost ~45× at comparable quality by moving from Grok to DeepSeek, with per-answer cost reporting.</p><p> Streamed structured answers with a live step-trace UI over Supabase Realtime; Next.js frontend, Supabase Postgres with row-level security for per-user data, Discord OAuth via Supabase Auth.</p><p> Built a Spring Boot RAG backend covering document ingestion, semantic chunking, pgvector embeddings and similarity search, and LLM-based analysis, with cost controls, correlation tracing and prompt governance designed in.</p>

Senior Java Consultant

MarketAxess · London, UK
Jul 2024 - Jul 2025 · 1 year

<p>Built the firm’s Data Mesh ingestion pipeline in Java 17 with Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, Debezium and Apache Iceberg, giving trading teams a way to self-publish governed data products rather than queueing behind a central data team.</p><p> Reduced onboarding for new data producers to a simple formality, shortening the path to reliable, compliant data underpinning firm-wide analytics and regulatory reporting.</p><p> Ran the platform as code on Kubernetes, Helm and ArgoCD, with JUnit 5, TestContainers and Mockito gating every change through a Bitbucket/Jenkins CI/CD pipeline.</p>

Senior Java Consultant

Amadeus · Remote (France / Bulgaria)
Jun 2022 - Jul 2024 · 2 years

<p>Improved performance and scalability of Cytric, Amadeus’s corporate travel and expense platform, a monolith spanning 1,000+ Oracle tables, by reworking domain-model relationships, background jobs and the Redis/Infinispan caching layers.</p><p> Migrated a legacy Servlet-based travel search microservice to Quarkus, replacing brittle in-house frameworks with a modern reactive runtime and improving startup time, memory efficiency and maintainability.</p><p> Delivered as a core engineer in a distributed Agile/Scrum team across France and Bulgaria, using Java 8/17, JUnit and Mockito, shipping through Git, Gradle and CI to OpenShift on Microsoft Azure.</p>

Lead Technical Consultant / Architect

TokenPass · Remote
Dec 2021 - Jun 2022 · 6 months

<p>Led engineering for a Web2-friendly SaaS platform that hid blockchain complexity from non-technical users, enabling Solana-based NFT minting and wallet creation through plain web UIs and APIs.</p><p> Designed Discord-integrated backend services in Node.js and GraphQL, letting community admins reward users with NFTs from a simple command, driving real-time engagement.</p><p> Cut running costs by migrating off a third-party backend (Chainstarters) to a self-managed Heroku deployment with Postgres, Magic Link auth and IPFS (NFT.Storage), with no loss of functionality.</p>

Senior Consultant / Architect

Boyle Software · New York City, USA
Jun 2016 - Dec 2021 · 5 years 5 months

<p>Halved Apache Spark ingestion runtime for DBS Bank through partitioning, caching and Snappy compression.</p><p> Led backend and full-stack delivery for multiple enterprise clients, including Vroom, Kinship/Whistle and DBS Bank, building cloud-native APIs, microservices and data platforms in Node.js, Go and Java on AWS and GCP.</p><p> Mentored the Vroom team by example as de facto senior engineer, championing unit testing and wiki documentation.</p><p> Architected secure, scalable backend systems such as Kinship’s Kintopia/Zootopia customer data APIs and Vroom’s account management, inventory and marketing ETL services, using Swagger, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Kafka and AWS Cognito with custom Lambda triggers.</p><p> Automated cloud infrastructure and raised the quality bar with Terraform, Docker and CI/CD pipelines, integration and load testing (Jest, Supertest, loader.io), monitoring (New Relic, Grafana) and automated validation tooling (Groovy, Unravel).</p>

Senior Full Stack Consultant

London School of Economics · London, UK
Mar 2016 - Jun 2016 · 3 months

<p>Sole engineer on LSE’s course search platform: a Grails 3 / Java 8 backend, AngularJS frontend, Spring Solr faceted search and an ETL pipeline, letting students discover and filter hundreds of courses.</p><p> Delivered four weeks ahead of schedule with strong stakeholder feedback, validated end to end with Geb, Spock and Jasmine.</p>

Lead Technical Consultant

International Assignments · Europe, Australia, the US, and Africa
Jan 2000 - Jan 2016 · 16 years

<p>Delivered 15+ complex enterprise distributed systems across Europe, Australia, the US, and Africa.</p><p> Key projects included building the national emergency alert backend (SAIP) for the French Ministry of the Interior, engineering a secure mobile banking portal for Capitec Bank (South Africa), and leading core system optimisations for the European Commission (OLAF), O2, and Amadeus Germany.</p>

Certifications

AWS Certified Developer – Associate

Amazon Web Services · Castlebar , Mayo , Ireland · 2024

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

Amazon Web Services · Castlebar , Mayo , Ireland · 2023

Skills

System design distributed systems microservices event-driven architecture REST APIs Java Spring Boot Quarkus Groovy Grails Node.js TypeScript Go Kafka Redis Infinispan PostgreSQL Oracle MySQL Supabase Kafka Streams Kafka Connect Debezium Apache Iceberg Apache Spark Elasticsearch Solr AWS Lambda Cognito Bedrock CloudWatch Microsoft Azure GCP Kubernetes OpenShift Docker Helm ArgoCD Terraform Claude Code OpenAI DeepSeek Grok Jev LangChain LangGraph Spring AI MCP RAG
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