● Mazes I’ve escaped · AI, Data & Cloud Platform Executive
Experience
A technology executive who builds AI, data and cloud platforms that work in regulated environments and hold up under scrutiny. Most recently I owned the AI/ML platform, AWS infrastructure, data governance and technology compliance at an identity verification company serving major banks, telecoms and government agencies. Before that, five years at AWS designing cloud, data and AI systems for FINRA, the Treasury, the IRS and the World Bank, and fourteen years inside the IRS modernization program. I’ve led teams for twenty-five years. I turn chaos into clarity.
- 30+
- years in technology
- 25
- years leading teams
- 5
- years at AWS
- 100+
- executive briefings & workshops
● Core capabilities
What I’m hired to do.
Three areas, and the work usually needs all three at once: the AI and data, the platform it runs on, and the people and rules around both.
AI & Data
- Production AI and LLM operationalization
- Evaluation and guardrails
- Data governance, lineage and retention
- Responsible AI
Platform & Cloud
- AWS multi-account architecture
- Reliability and observability
- FinOps
- DevSecOps and Zero Trust
Leadership & Governance
- Leading through managers
- Executive partnership
- Technology compliance (NIST 800-53, CIS, SOC 2)
- Audit and customer assurance
● Selected achievements
Results, with numbers.
The outcomes I’d point to first, each with the number that sums it up. Most are from my most recent role at AuthenticID; the rest are from the IRS, AWS and Attain.
67%
lower AWS spend
Platform economics
Cut AWS spend from $750K to $250K a year inside 90 days through FinOps, consolidation and automation, while the teams affected got faster rather than slower.
30% → 100%
cloud compliance
Standards adopted across teams I didn’t own
Drove cloud compliance against CIS Benchmarks and NIST 800-53 Rev. 5 across technology teams outside my reporting line, working through their managers and engineers.
1 Week → 2 hrs
customer audit time
Made the evidence hold up
Turned the AWS portion of bank customer audits into a two-hour, fully transparent, 100% successful review, and led the SOC 2 audit to clean results.
~90%
less documentation effort
Production AI, measured
Operationalized LLM-augmented workflows across engineering and research, cut documentation effort by roughly 90%, and built the evaluation frameworks that made model behavior measurable rather than anecdotal.
50+ TB
noncompliant data retired
Built the governed platform
Consolidated sensitive and operational data scattered across laptops, EC2 instances, Google Drives and multiple AWS accounts into one governed, monitored platform with lineage, enforced retention and role-based access, retiring 50+ TB of noncompliant PII.
1,600%
testing productivity gain
Rebuilt testing for IRS modernization
Designed and shipped a functional-testing process and its supporting applications for the IRS modernization program: $1M+ in savings and a 1,600% productivity gain, with current, error-free data.
$52.5M
three-year AWS commitment
Grew the FINRA account at AWS
Instrumental in growing the FINRA account and securing a three-year, $52.5M Enterprise Discount Program, working directly with their Chief Architect, CISO and VPs while supporting up to 45 simultaneous AWS service betas.
$2.8B
federal proposal
Wrote the AI/ML methodology for a federal bid
Primary author of the 20-page AI/ML Process & Execution Methodology section of the USPS IT Solutions proposal, worth $250M to Attain and $2.8B overall.
118%
of quota
Opened new university territory for AWS
One of two Solutions Architects covering greenfield Tier-1 research universities across Florida, Georgia and Alabama: reached 118% of quota and rolled out contract vehicles with universities and medical centers in all three states.
Production you can see
Owned logging, monitoring, observability and incident response across a multi-account AWS platform, so engineers could diagnose production rather than guess, and auditors could see the evidence.
Twenty-five years leading teams
Ran three teams through their own team leads at Attain, and moved technology organizations at AuthenticID by working through their managers and engineers rather than around them.
The work nobody assigned
Asked to tidy up AuthenticID’s AWS accounts, I found the data governance problem nobody had been asked to look at, wrote up the diagnosis and a recommendation, and was handed the transformation. Two other teams launched follow-on initiatives off the back of it.
In the words of people who were there.
From my most recent CTO, colleagues and a partner strategist at AWS, and a partner and a direct report at Attain. The LinkedIn recommendations can be read in full on my LinkedIn profile.
Bill’s demonstration of customer obsession, ownership, bias for action, learn and be curious, earn trust and DIVE DEEP leadership principles has been on near constant display around all his interactions with me, Partners, and customers and I would be remiss not to call out his work as an example of the highest standards we all strive to emulate in our work here at AWS.
Tiz Caster
AWS Partner Strategist, 2018 · on a NIST 800-171 engagement for the UCF Office of Research
What consistently stood out about Bill was his ability both to identify important upstream problems in advance and to bring practical, scalable solutions for these issues to the table. Over time, he became our single go-to expert in AWS, security, compliance, and AI/ML infrastructure.
Franklin Fite
CTO, AuthenticID · LinkedIn recommendation
Bill does a difficult, high-stakes job that few would want, and he does it exceptionally well. His expertise in AWS, security, compliance, and ML infrastructure is unmatched in the company, and his methodical, detail-oriented approach ensures that we maintain a strong security posture.
Franklin Fite
CTO, AuthenticID · 2025 annual appraisal
What I observed in Bill was the combination the AI/ML field needs more of: deep technical authority at the platform level, the ability to translate it into accessible workshops and executive-facing material, and the instinct to invest in the people around him rather than guard the work.
Suman Debnath
Former Principal Developer Advocate, AWS · LinkedIn recommendation
This is seriously one of the best AI oriented implementation guides I have read. We can truly make it into a series of podcasts and newsletters and marketing materials. This is our differentiation.
Ravi Mudumby
Partner, Attain · on my white paper on machine learning vs. traditional software development
Bill’s super power, plain and simple, is delivery. He comes through, often well ahead of schedule, with exactly what is needed for the particular project.
AWS colleague
Peer review, 2018
When you joined, you have really made quite the difference in the culture of our AI/ML group and been a positive impact on our team. Without you joining, I know I wouldn’t have stuck around as long as I did.
Joe Webb
Direct report, Attain
● Speaking & recognition
On stage, and asked back.
I’ve spent a good part of my career explaining hard technology to the people who have to decide what to do about it: more than 50 talks while at AWS, and 100+ executive briefings and hands-on workshops, from boardroom sessions to conference audiences in the thousands.
Selected speaking engagements
Headline talk of the day
AI Summit San Francisco
A conference of 4,500+ attendees
Headline talk
AI for Good Global Summit
Geneva, 2020 · participants from 34 countries
Headline talk of the day
Harvard ComputeFest
Led to an invitation to teach a graduate course at Harvard, and later guest lectures there
Keynote and full-day workshop
Georgia State / Georgia Tech AI Symposium
Joint AI Scientific Computing Day Symposium, 2017
Workshop lead
AWS conference workshops
Reinforcement learning workshops at an AWS conference of 17,000 attendees
Featured presenter, twice
IBM Rational Software Development Conference
The international conference for IBM Rational software
Invited panelist
NIST Cybersecurity Risk Management Conference
Top Immersion Day speaker
AWS Immersion Days
Full-day sessions for customers; 4.5+ average satisfaction score
Primary speaker
IBM Rational / Microsoft Visual Studio .NET seminars
Public seminars with more than 500 attendees
Guest lecturer
10+ universities
Harvard, Georgia Tech, Georgia State, UF, FSU, UCF, USF, FIU, FAU and the University of Miami: ML, cloud architecture, responsible AI
Bill, you were the cornerstone of our symposium, and anything else that I may say would do you injustice.
Semir Sarajlic
Chair, Georgia State / Georgia Tech AI Scientific Computing Day Symposium, 2017
Bill Richmond is a wonderful presenter. He’s a true expert, very interesting and relevant. Top-Notch.
AWS customer
Survey response, AI/ML talk series, 2020
That walkthrough became the foundation for more than a dozen AI/ML workshops I went on to deliver across India, Nepal, Malaysia, and other countries, reaching over 2,500 attendees in total.
Suman Debnath
Former Principal Developer Advocate, AWS · LinkedIn recommendation
Recognition
Asked to help write the exams
Subject matter expert for three AWS certification exams: Machine Learning Specialty, Security Specialty, and Solutions Architect Professional.
Invited to teach at Harvard
After the ComputeFest talk, the Institute for Applied Computational Science offered a graduate teaching slot. I guest-lectured on stream-data and graph-parallel processing instead.
Invited to keynote
Invited to give the closing-day keynote at ITNG, the 17th International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations, in Las Vegas.
Workshops other people chose to teach
The AI/ML workshops I wrote at AWS (800+ slides, 12 hours of hands-on labs) were picked up by specialists across the company, delivered in 12 countries, and featured by AWS Global AI/ML Field Marketing.
Sought out by publishers
Packt asked me to review their book Engineering MLOps; the editors of Towards Data Science and Geek Culture each asked to publish my essay on soft skills for data scientists.
Published and featured
IBM ran my feature article on a previously undocumented API, and Rational adopted my use-case white paper as its framework for requirements-management engagements. The IRS profiled my work in a feature sent to all of its IT staff.
● Professional experience
Thirty years, most recent first.
The patternHired for one thing, then handed the adjacent problem four times by two different CTOs, because each layer I fixed exposed an upstream problem nobody else was positioned to solve.
- 2025 – Present
Independent
Writer & Advisor
- Published 80+ essays on AI governance, data platform strategy, operating model design, human nature, and leadership for senior technology and business leaders.
- Advise former colleagues and peers informally on AI adoption and data governance decisions in regulated environments.
- 2022 – 2025
AuthenticID
Senior Director, Software & ML Engineering
Tampa, FL (Remote)
Identity verification and fraud prevention for major banks, telecoms, and government agencies. Scope: AI/ML platform, AWS infrastructure, data governance, technology compliance. Three direct reports, driving change across technology teams of 25 to 40. Partnered directly with the CTO and executive team.
- Joined Research as Computer Vision E2E Test and Release Manager and was promoted four times across two CTOs into Senior Director, Software and ML Engineering, taking on infrastructure, data governance and technology compliance for the technology organization.
- Led a $1M+ build of a new ten-account AWS Organization for the Research team (data lake, SageMaker environment, ML pipelines) and trained the researchers and developers who moved onto it; it replaced two older environments and cut spend 67% within three months.
- Took over every AWS environment, two Organizations and roughly 30 accounts, then mapped ownership, retired what was redundant and consolidated the rest.
- Owned the platform end to end: AWS multi-account architecture, identity and access boundaries, logging and observability, and the standards engineering built against.
- Led company-wide LLM enablement and built evaluation and guardrail practices so AI output could be put in front of bank customers and defended.
- Rebuilt the data governance operating model and instrumented it, so classification, retention and access were enforced and observable rather than documented and assumed.
- Served as technical counterpart in enterprise customer audits and security reviews, translating between bank risk officers, auditors and engineering teams.
- Used LLMs to surface hidden security, governance and documentation gaps across the environment at a scale manual review could not reach.
- 2021
Maximus (Attain)
Chief Data Scientist
Tampa, FL
- Led three teams through their own team leads, directing 12 data scientists on mission-critical AI/ML modernization at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; spearheaded the agency-wide Amazon SageMaker rollout, including an AWS Secrets Manager TAB approval that had been denied twice before.
- Established the corporate AI/ML and Cloud Centers of Excellence, and was primary author of the AI/ML methodology section of a $250M / $2.8B USPS IT Solutions proposal.
- Authored or led AI/ML proposal responses for DHS USCIS, the Joint AI Center, CDC, NIH and ICE, and wrote the cloud architecture white paper Attain adopted as its framework for proposal work.
- 2020 – 2021
Chargebacks911
Chief Information Officer & Head of Artificial Intelligence
Clearwater, FL
- Recruited to scale operations and introduce AI. Inside two weeks, delivered a concrete roadmap covering AWS cost reduction, outage prevention, a CIS and SOC 2 compliance path, documentation consolidation, and AI pilots.
- 2015 – 2020
Amazon Web Services
Sr. AI/ML Evangelist · Sr. Solutions Architect, Worldwide Public Sector
Herndon, VA / Tampa, FL
- Three progressive roles over five years: Sr. Solutions Architect, Federal Financial (FINRA-led; instrumental in a three-year, $52.5M Enterprise Discount Program; supported up to 45 simultaneous AWS service betas), then Sr. Solutions Architect, Education (118% of quota in greenfield Tier-1 territory across FL, GA and AL), then Sr. AI/ML Evangelist, WWPS Partners.
- Scaled AI/ML adoption across NLP, computer vision, anomaly detection and recommendation systems, from architecture through production operation and monitoring, for FINRA, the IRS, Treasury and the World Bank.
- Delivered 100+ executive briefings and technical workshops on generative AI, responsible AI, AI governance and the ML lifecycle for federal, education and partner audiences.
- Gave 50+ talks, including headline slots at AI Summit San Francisco, the AI for Good Global Summit and Harvard ComputeFest, and engaged at VP level or above with more than a dozen customers, among them FINRA, the IRS, Georgia Tech and Florida’s research universities.
- Subject matter expert for three AWS certification exams (Machine Learning Specialty, Security Specialty, Solutions Architect Professional); authored 800+ slides of workshop reference material used by AI/ML specialists across AWS in 12 countries.
- Mentored colleagues from L4 to L7, conducted 50 hiring interviews, and picked up Canadian account teams that had no Solutions Architect coverage, on top of the day job.
- 2001 – 2015
Internal Revenue Service
Sr. Technical Adviser (GS-15, Step 10)
Lanham-Seabrook, MD
- Senior federal technology leader inside the IRS modernization program, the largest civilian technology contract in U.S. history ($20B, 1,500+ people).
- Architected the enterprise Collaborative Lifecycle Management platform; designed a functional-testing automation that delivered $1M+ in savings and a 1,600% productivity gain.
- Trained 1,000+ employees in software development tools and methods, and ran software upgrades across 1,000+ workstations and dozens of servers nationwide.
- Led agile, DevOps, and modern SDLC adoption; negotiated prime and subcontractor relationships across CSC, IBM, and SAIC. Held a full Treasury clearance.
- 1991 – 2004
Northrop Grumman · IBM Rational · Lockheed Martin · Florida Department of State
Senior Technical and Consulting Roles
- Led large-scale engineering, enterprise architecture, and modern SDLC adoption (object-oriented design, use cases, automated testing, agile) across defense, federal, and commercial software environments.
- At IBM Rational, technical engagement manager for 15+ companies including American Express, Carnival, FP&L, Nortel, Royal Caribbean and Siemens; wrote the use-case white paper Rational adopted as its framework for requirements-management engagements.
- Started in image processing and recognition: “smart weapons” software at Lockheed Martin in 1991, then image recognition and tracking code for Northrop Grumman’s Joint STARS surveillance platform. Taught mathematics at Florida State in between.
- Twice a featured presenter at the international IBM Rational Software Development Conference. Held Secret-level, SAP, and COMSEC clearances on Joint STARS.
● Education & certifications
Trained as a mathematician.
Education
- M.S., Applied Mathematics — Florida State University
- B.S., Applied Mathematics — University of Central Florida
Certifications
- AWS Solutions Architect — Professional and Associate
- AWS DevOps Engineer — Professional
- AWS Developer — Associate
- AWS SysOps Administrator — Associate
- IBM: Rational Unified Process, Requirements Management, OOAD (UML), Automated Testing