Richard Alan Sartor, Jr.

richard.sartor@metaindu.com – https://www.linkedin.com/in/izrik/ – https://github.com/izrik/

Professional Summary

Senior Distributed Systems and Infrastructure Engineer with 18+ years of experience designing and operating production-grade backend platforms in cloud and regulated environments. Deep expertise in Python services, container orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code. Proven record leading multi-environment migrations and building reliable, observable systems supporting data and analytics workloads. Strong interest in machine learning infrastructure and experimentation systems.

Technologies & Core Competencies

Languages: Python, C#, Go
Cloud & Orchestration: Kubernetes, AWS (ECS, EKS, S3), GCP
Data & Storage: PostgreSQL, BigQuery, DBT, SQLAlchemy
Observability & Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog
Web & Networking: HTTP (deep protocol knowledge), API gateways/reverse proxies, gRPC, Nginx
CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Bazel, Starlark
Infrastructure & Tools: Docker, Terraform, Ansible, Flask, OpenGL, X12 270/271, Jira, Slack APIs
Core Competencies: Distributed and parallel systems design; data-intensive backend architectures; infrastructure-as-code; CI/CD for compute workloads; observability-driven operations; machine learning systems fundamentals (training vs. inference, evaluation workflows, experimentation patterns).
ML Systems Exposure: Model serving, inference APIs, configuration-driven experimentation, LLM integration workflows.

Employment History

Metaphysics Industries, Inc.

Founder & Principal Engineer (Oct 2006 – Present)

Independent software engineering consultancy focused on backend systems, cloud infrastructure, and computational tooling.

Created and open-sourced FbxSharp, a pure C# FBX file loader with structured object mapping and SDK interoperability; published via NuGet and used in independent 3D tooling and game development workflows.
Developed and open-sourced ChamberLib, a modular .NET 3D engine framework including rendering abstractions, animation systems, camera control, math primitives, and asset integration; currently used in development of an original game.
Designed and implemented Solus, a symbolic algebra engine supporting expression trees, simplification, and evaluation; integrated with custom parsing and UI layers.
Built and open-sourced MetaphysicsIndustries.Giza, a GLR-style parser engine enabling ambiguous grammar handling and dynamic parse tree construction; used by Solus for mathematical expression parsing.
Developed Ligra, an interactive UI layer for symbolic math visualization and exploration, built atop the Solus engine.
Developed Python web applications (Flask, SQLAlchemy), including containerization, database configuration, HTTPS setup, and infrastructure provisioning with Terraform and Kubernetes.
Managed environment configuration and deployments using infrastructure-as-code practices.
Implemented production monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana.
Built a lightweight REST service around llama.cpp (via llama_cpp_python) to expose local LLM inference as a configurable model-serving API.
Containerized and extended OpenCode into a self-hosted coding assistant, integrating it with RocketChat to enable conversational development workflows.
Implemented configurable model selection, context management, and logging to support lightweight experimentation and usage analysis.

Accorded, Inc.

Senior Data Engineer I (Sep 2025 – Feb 2026)

Operated and maintained healthcare analytics and data transformation pipelines using BigQuery and DBT.
Supported reliable execution of data workflows operating on multi-gigabyte datasets in a HIPAA-regulated environment.
Contributed to query performance improvements and data model consistency in collaboration with analytics stakeholders.

Global Goods Exchange, Inc.

Full Stack Engineer (May 2024 – Aug 2025)

Led migration of 10–15 microservices from GCP to AWS EKS across four environments (development, staging, demo, production), rebuilding infrastructure as code using Terraform.
Standardized containerized deployment workflows, improving environment parity and deployment reliability.
Automated database migration and release processes to reduce operational risk.
Contributed to backend services in Go and internal tooling in Python supporting production operations.
Strengthened system observability and operational stability during multi-cloud transition.
Built custom Bazel build rules to automate Go service builds and deployments, integrating Terraform and Python scripts into a unified command that significantly reduced manual deployment steps and errors.

Mental Health EHR Start-up

DevOps Engineer [Contract] (Aug 2022 – May 2024)

Led containerization and migration of a 30+ service healthcare platform to AWS ECS, upgrading two of three environments while maintaining operational continuity in a HIPAA-regulated setting.
Designed VPC, IAM, and network segmentation patterns enforcing strict data confidentiality requirements.
Architected Terraform-managed infrastructure enabling secure, repeatable multi-environment deployments.
Implemented automated CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions to streamline release workflows.
Integrated Datadog observability to improve reliability, latency tracking, and operational transparency.
Produced long-term infrastructure documentation and deployment standards supporting team scaling.

Meet Nirvana

Software Developer [Contract] (Nov 2023 – Feb 2024)

Developed a Python library for converting healthcare eligibility transactions between X12 (270/271) and non-standardized JSON formats.
Built CLI tooling to analyze and transform complex JSON document structures.
Implemented repository security controls using git-crypt to protect sensitive credentials.

Food Delivery Start-up

DevOps Engineer [Contract] (Apr 2022 – Aug 2022)

Integrated PostgreSQL performance metrics with Prometheus.
Designed Grafana dashboards to monitor database and Kubernetes cluster health.
Implemented GitHub Actions workflows to automate deployment notifications and operational alerts.
Configured Prometheus alerting to proactively detect infrastructure failures.

Enterprise Analytics Firm

Performance QA Engineer [Contract] (Jul 2021 – Mar 2022)

Automated performance benchmarking of legacy desktop applications during migration to web services.
Extended k6 testing framework to support TypeScript-based distributed load testing.
Designed repeatable performance evaluation workflows for distributed service validation.

Fortune 100 Health Insurer

QA Engineer [Contract] (Jun 2020 – May 2021)

Developed a Python-based integration testing framework for containerized gRPC microservices running in Docker and Kubernetes.
Managed CI/CD pipelines executing multi-stage test suites and publishing results to AWS S3.
Automated failure triage workflows, including Jira ticket creation and Slack notifications.
Coordinated with operations teams to ensure test infrastructure availability across environments.

Tech Mahindra

Senior Test Engineer (Jul 2019 – Dec 2019)

Lead maintainer of an internally-developed performance testing platform that ran on OpenShift/Kubernetes. Supported the dev team by writing tests and custom testing libraries for the specific needs of projects.

Rackspace US, Inc. – San Antonio, TX

Software Developer in Test III (Jan 2012 – Jul 2019)

Developed custom testing libraries and automation frameworks for large-scale hosted systems.
Created and maintained Jenkins CI pipelines supporting multiple engineering teams.
Designed Deproxy, a testing tool for validating reverse proxy behavior in distributed environments.
Collaborated cross-functionally with developers, operations engineers, and product managers to ensure reliability and delivery alignment.
Worked on Repose, a high-throughput reverse proxy and API gateway, developing deep expertise in HTTP protocol behavior, request routing, and edge cases under load.
Contributed to ATOM Hopper, a high-throughput internal pub/sub messaging system used as critical infrastructure across multiple teams, with strong reliability and performance requirements.

Publications

Agaian, S., Sartor, R. (2012) Local Enhancement and Denoising Algorithms on Arbitrary Mesh Surfaces. Proceedings of SPIE Vol. 8406 Mobile Multimedia/Image Processing, Security, and Applications 2012. Baltimore, MD. April 23–24, 2012

Education

Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Texas San Antonio – December 2008

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