Ryan Knight

About Ryan Knight

Throughout my career, I\'ve consistently positioned myself at the forefront of technological shifts—from early cloud adoption to data engineering and now to exploring Generative AI. My career journey has evolved from software engineer to solution architect to running my own consulting company. This path has been driven by a passion for mastering technology at the cutting edge, following the evolution of modern software from foundational distributed systems and large-scale data engineering pipelines to my current focus on AI Engineering.I specialize in architecting comprehensive solutions that bridge business vision and technical implementation, serving as a trusted technical advisor to enterprise customers. I excel at helping executives translate complex requirements into scalable and resilient architectures that development teams can successfully build and maintain.Building on this experience, I have recently been prototyping with Generative AI technologies like RAG, GraphRAG and Agentic AI applications. My current focus is to combine my experience with distributed systems and data engineering to build reliable Agentic Applications that solve real-world problems, an example of which is my open-source Durable Agent Framework. I actively share these learnings with the developer community by speaking at international conferences (GOTO Amsterdam, QCon, Devoxx), creating open-source projects, and mentoring others. See: https://github.com/retroryan/durable-ai-agentKey SkillsSolution Architecture: Translate complex business requirements into scalable, enterprise-grade technical architectures, bridging the gap between business needs and technical implementation.Leadership & Advisory: Serve as a trusted technical advisor to stakeholders from C-suite to engineering, while recruiting, leading, and mentoring high-performing agile teams.Cloud & Data Engineering: Architect and implement scalable cloud-native data platforms (AWS, Kubernetes) and modern data ecosystems (Databricks, Spark, Kafka) for both batch and real-time processing at scale.AI Engineering: Developing a custom Durable Agent Framework using DSPy for optimized prompting and reliable, LLM-driven tool calling, and Temporal for workflow durability, using various LLMs like OpenAI and Claude. Experimenting with RAG/GraphRAG systems using Elasticsearch, Neo4j, etc.Core Technologies: Production expertise in Go, Python and Java for high-performance backend development.Technical Enablement: International conference speaker, workshop facilitator and team mentorship.

Experience

1. Senior Partner Architect

   Neo4j

   Oct 2025 — Present · Park City, UT, US

   As a Senior Partner Architect on the Neo4j Partner Architecture team, I architect enterprise-grade Generative AI solutions and spearhead strategic partnerships with Microsoft Azure and Databricks. I work at the intersection of graph technology and AI, helping customers build innovative solutions on cloud-native platforms. Our team drives comprehensive sell-market-build initiatives across the entire cloud ecosystem, including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Snowflake, and Databricks, enabling partners and customers to unlock the full potential of connected data.

Education

• Utah Valley University

  Bachelors, Computer Science

  1995 — 1999

• University of Colorado Boulder

  Masters, Engineering Management

  1999 — 2001

Skills

• Maven
• Html5
• Architecture
• Integration
• Spring
• Open Source
• Ruby on Rails
• Database Design
• Rest
• Akka
• Relational Databases
• Agile Methodologies
• Architectures
• Software Project Management
• Hibernate
• Scalability
• Scala
• Spring Framework
• Play Framework
• Java
• Enterprise Software
• Flex
• Enterprise Architecture
• Cloud Computing
• Git
• Distributed Systems
• Javascript
• Html 5