John Ripley

About John Ripley

Senior Director and Principal Architect with 30 years of experience designing and leading large-scale data platforms, distributed systems, and analytics solutions across government, consulting, startup, and enterprise environments.I specialize in cloud-native, event-driven, and lakehouse architectures on AWS, combining streaming, batch, CDC, graph, and AI-assisted data pipelines into resilient, scalable platforms. I have 25+ years as a hands-on Python and Java engineer, and a proven track record of mentoring high-performing engineering teams, modernizing legacy systems, and establishing architecture governance at scale.Key strengths include:• Enterprise Data & Platform Architecture — Designed and led large-scale data platforms spanning streaming, batch, CDC, and lakehouse architectures, supporting high-volume, mission-critical analytics in regulated and commercial environments.• Cloud-Native AWS Architectures — Deep expertise building AWS-native platforms leveraging Kafka/MSK, Glue, Lambda, S3, Iceberg, and Lake Formation to deliver scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient data systems.• Event-Driven & Microservices Platforms — Architected event-driven, microservice-based ecosystems enabling real-time ingestion, processing, and downstream analytics across distributed systems.• Advanced Data & AI-Enabled Pipelines — Integrated generative AI and agentic workflows into data pipelines to enhance data quality, enrichment, and analytical insight at scale.• Architecture Leadership & Governance — Established and institutionalized architecture governance practices, including ADRs, C4 modeling, and architecture reviews, to drive consistency and long-term platform evolution.• Product & Roadmap Partnership — Partnered closely with product leadership to align architecture with business strategy, delivery roadmaps, and multi-quarter investment planning.• Technical Due Diligence & Risk Management — Led technical evaluations, trade-off analyses, and due diligence for complex platforms, M&A activities, and enterprise initiatives.• Innovation & Intellectual Property — Proven innovator with 12 issued patents and 1 pending, translating advanced analytics, graph, and similarity algorithms into differentiated, production-grade platforms.I’m equally comfortable setting strategy with executives, reviewing designs with architects, or diving deep with engineers to solve complex technical problems.

Experience

1. Sr Director - Data Architecture

   Everstream Analytics

   Jul 2022 — Present · US

   Led the architecture, design, and implementation of an opinionated, enterprise-scale data platform supporting streaming, batch, CDC pipelines and lakehouse-style analytics in an AWS-based environment - Designed and implemented event-driven architecture (EDA) to support real-time ingestion, processing, and downstream analytics (API Gateway, Lambda, MSK/Kafka)- Architected high-throughput batch processing pipelines for large-scale data processing (Glue/Pyspark)- Implemented change data capture (CDC) pipelines to enable near–real-time data synchronization across operational and analytical systems (DMS, Glue/Pyspark)- Established a medallion data architecture to support governed, scalable, and performant business intelligence and reporting (LakeFormation, Glue/Pyspark, Iceberg)- Implemented a polyglot data persistence strategy, incorporating transactional, analytical, and graph-oriented data stores based on workload characteristics (Postgres, Neo4J/Cypher, Opensearch, S3/Iceberg)- Developed world-class entity resolution engine managing/resolving 100s of million of unique entities across billions of observations at scale (proprietary)- Designed generative AI-assisted data enrichment workflows, using evaluator-optimizer pattern, to enhance data quality and contextual relevance (LangGraph, LLMs, and MCP-based web search providers)• Managed and mentored a team of 10+ data engineers, overseeing the delivery and operational reliability of 80+ production data pipelines• Partnered closely with Product Management to define architecture-aligned roadmaps, delivery plans, and multi-quarter initiatives• Established and institutionalized architecture governance practices, including architecture reviews, architecture decision records (ADRs), C4 diagrams, and centralized architectural documentation

Education

• Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology

  Computer Science - 4 year degree

  1989 — 1993

Skills

• Software Development Life Cycle (Sdlc)
• Big Data
• Java
• Software Development
• Xml
• Rest
• Apache Kafka
• Representational State Transfer (Rest)
• Jboss Application Server
• Amazon Web Services (Aws)
• Junit
• System Architecture
• Solution Architecture
• Agile Methodologies
• Data Modeling
• Sql
• Linux
• Architecture
• Service-Oriented Architecture (Soa)
• Java Enterprise Edition
• Enterprise Software
• Ldap
• Enterprise Architecture
• Databases
• Git
• Maven
• Web Services
• Data Warehousing
• Professional Services
• Hadoop
• Mysql
• Soa
• Tomcat
• Business Intelligence
• Analytics
• Spring Framework
• Software Engineering
• Oracle
• Cloud Computing
• Soap