Resume

A dazzling and beautiful professional headshot photograph of Patrick Wagstrom

Patrick Wagstrom

Data Engineering and Artificial Intelligence Leader

Strategic and hands-on executive leader in artificial intelligence, machine learning, data engineering, and software development with extensive experience in organizations across finance, telecom, and video streaming. Proven track record in driving cutting-edge impactful AI/ML initiatives, building high-performing teams, modernizing data pipelines, and driving significant business value.

Professional Experience

    • Grainger Chicago, IL and Hartford, CT Senior Director Applied ML July 2023 - August 2024 Full Time (40 hours/week)
      • Led team of 43 FTE ML scientists, software engineers, and product managers on product search and discovery, LLM agents, computer vision, ML in mobile applications, data pipelines, and governance.
      • Developed an LLM-based customer service agent using search and unstructured data with OpenAI on Azure to provide human-in-the-middle assistance to Grainger employees.
      • Enhanced the search capabilities of Grainger.com, the 11th largest ecommerce site in the US, through introduction of vector and hybrid search.
      • Led team that build out innovative synthetic data generation product identification using 3D CAD models, Stable Diffusion, and Unity.
      • Designed overall data architecture and MLOps integration - integrating an S3 data lake with data products, Kafka event streaming, Databricks for MLOps and data processing workflows, Snowflake for analytical workflows, and Atlan for data governance.
      • Defined the ML Scientist job family across the company and integrate it into overall talent strategy including recruiting and talent development.
      • Worked with legal partners to define and implement generative AI governance process.
    • Brightcove Boston, MA and Hartford, CT Chief Data Officer May 2021 - December 2022 Full Time (40 hours/week)
      • Responsible for all analytics, data, and machine learning at Brightcove - including engineering, governance, policy, and vendor relations.
      • Owned end-to-end analytics collection and processing systems handling trillions of rows of data and billions of monthly video views on both AWS and GCP.
      • Managed an organization of 34 FTEs and 12 contractors, overseeing data platforms, analytics and insights, data and model governance, and customer-facing data products.
      • Executed the $12.3 million acquisition of Wicket Labs, expanding Brightcove's viewer analytics capabilities and growing the product customer base by over 50x in under a year.
      • Collaborated closely with C-level executives at Brightcove and customers, driving corporate strategies and fostering strong business relationships.
      • Negotiated and owned a multi-million dollar partnership with Google Cloud Platform - securing a 7-figure discount.
      • Maintained and expanded multi-cloud data infrastructure using tools such as Trino, Glue, Lambda, SageMaker, and Redshift on AWS and BigQuery, Cloud Composer, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub on GCP.
    • Capital One New York, NY and McLean, VA Senior Director of Data Science January 2019 - September 2019 Full Time (40 hours/week) Director of Data Science November 2016 - January 2019 Full Time (40 hours/week)
      • Architect and overall lead of the Capital One Card Machine Learning Platform - a platform for scalable and personalized real-time reinforcement learning-based machine learning models using tools such as Kubernetes, gRPC, and AWS in a heavily regulated environment.
      • Led a team that deployed and managed multi-modal customer intelligence models working on both structured and unstructured text and voice data, resulting in $27 million annual savings.
      • Hired, managed, and developed a distributed team of 18 data scientists and data analysts.
      • Built out a $1.2mm academic research partnership with universities to explore responsibility and fairness in artificial intelligence.
      • Conducted more than 300 hiring interviews to help grow Card Machine Learning from 33 to 168 people and Capital One’s New York Card team from 8 to nearly 200.
      • Championed reproducible machine learning and MLOps across the organization, ensuring best practices in data management, model training and refit, model serving, and risk management.
      • Collaborated with cross-functional teams to develop and implement the company’s data privacy and AI ethics policies.
    • IBM Watson Littleton, MA Research Staff Member/Technical Lead January 2014 - November 2016 Full Time (40 hours/week)
      • Led a globally distributed team that built the IBM Watson Conversation service - an innovative service to create rich conversational interfaces with natural language processing.
      • Global team lead for Watson Developer Cloud Tooling. Created cutting edge applications for creating, training, and maintaining cognitive and machine learning solutions including Watson Engagement Advisor and IBM Watson Natural Language Classifier.
      • Technical lead for Chef Watson and the IBM Food Truck - one of the first consumer facing generative AI solutions - demonstrated in 2014 garnering more than 1 billion media impressions.
      • Researched, designed, and built tools to customize AI/ML models and systems at scale - supporting hundreds of thousands of users and use cases.
      • Traveled around the world to conduct research with and work side-by-side with our customers to better understand the potential for AI/ML.
      • Led evolution of internal development standards and tools from a legacy Java stack to a modern stack based on Node.js and embracing tools such a GitHub.
    • IBM TJ Watson Research Center Yorktown Heights, NY Research Staff Member August 2009 - January 2014 Full Time (40 hours/week)
      • Team lead for the “Millennial Enterprise” aspect of IBM’s 2013 Global Technology Outlook, which described the need for user data in building out AI/ML to IBM and customer C-Level executives.
      • Analytics lead for JazzHub, IBM’s cloud software development strategy. Designed analytics strategy, introduced A/B testing, and developed analytics dashboards.
      • Developed and designed GitMiner - an open source project used by 15 universities to perform graph analysis on large scale software engineering repositories such as GitHub and BitBucket.
      • Led a research team to evaluate productivity of new users and small teams using IBM’s enterprise software engineering and product development environments.
      • Published papers on topics around distributed collaboration, technical debt in software, and flow of ideas in software engineering communities.
      • Developed WhatsMyBrand, a framework for assessing an individual’s personal brand by analyzing connections and contents of their actions through public social networks and relating those actions to the actions of others in their network.
      • Worked with IBM clients to teach about uncertainty and value elicitation in software development.
      • Mapped extended stakeholders in enterprise software development and analyzed their relation to technical debt.
      • Developed novel methods and metrics for understanding extended enterprise software development stakeholder collaboration and coordination.
      • Managed research on collaboration in software development with three different universities through an Open Collaborative Research grant.
      • Mentored three Ph.D. students on projects related to collaboration in software engineering.
    • Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA Graduate Research Assistant August 2003 - July 2009
      • Conducted research on the interactions between people and firms in the development of open source software in a dual Ph.D. degree program between the School of Computer Science and College of Engineering.
      • Designed and developed CVSMiner an open source tool to perform social network and technical analysis of software engineering ecosystems such as GNOME and Eclipse.
      • Worked with members of the GNOME Foundation and Eclipse Foundation to evaluate and improve the relationships between non-profit foundations that manage open source ecosystems and commercial firms.
      • Delivered lectures in classes on software engineering and technology policy.
      • Utilized a variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods: stakeholder interviews, message analysis, natural language processing, data mining, machine learning, and social network analysis to generate insight into largely ad hoc software development processes.
    • IBM TJ Watson Research Center Hawthorne, NY Summer Research Intern June 2007 - August 2007
      • Expanded the Socio-Technical Congruence metric, which relates communication between individuals and technical dependencies inferred from archived data.
      • Developed a model of successful projects that transitioned from IBM proprietary technologies to strong open source communities.
      • Developed novel visualizations of communication and congruence in software development teams.
    • Computer Science Department, Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL Teaching/Research Assistant September 2000 - August 2003
      • Managed a group of twelve undergraduates to develop an ambitious automated tour system utilizing Segways and mobile devices for wireless location sensing and data in an era years before the iPhone and Android.
      • Hired and managed three undergraduates to develop a python based framework for pervasive computing based on web services technologies.
      • Designed graduate level class on grid and pervasive computing.
      • Delivered numerous lectures on a wide variety of related to distributed computer, operating systems, and computer architecture.
    • Argonne National Laboratory - Math and Computer Science Division Summer Research Intern Argonne, IL April 2002-September 2002
      • Developed the Grid Services Flow Language for specifying dependencies and flow in the GLOBUS environment.
      • Worked with the SciDAC Java CoG Kit Team and the Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemistry to develop a grid services based system for analysis of thermochemical tables.
    • LEC, Ltd Chicago, IL Senior Developer April 1999-September 2000
      • Designed, ordered, installed, and managed a commercial grade data center for advertising agency clients.
      • Architected and developed E-Stakes, a multi-million user capable system for tying offline purchases to online activities.
      • Designed and managed the technical components of the Chicago Transit Authority’s “Take it and Win” promotion that utilized CTA transit cards to tie together offline and online behavior of transit riders.
      • Worked directly with designers and clients to sell and develop usable, novel, and cutting edge web experiences.
    • MyPoints Schaumburg, IL Developer April 1998-September 1998
      • Designed and implemented a complete customer relationship management system in PL/SQL and Java.
      • Integrated customer service system to work with multiple advertising campaigns and custom co-branded sites.

Education