Charles McQuain

Engineering Leader & Cloud Architect

6+ years building enterprise AI systems, leading engineering teams, and delivering measurable business impact.

CurrentlyPlatform Development Lead

Team DevelopmentMentoring 7 Engineers

CertificationsAWS & GCP Certified

Core Expertise

Cloud Architecture (AWS/GCP)AI/ML Systems & LLMsEngineering LeadershipDevOps & CI/CDMicroservices ArchitectureInfrastructure as CodeFull-Stack DevelopmentTeam MentorshipSystem DesignPerformance Optimization

A Bit About Me

I'm a platform engineering lead who genuinely loves both sides of the job: writing code and developing people. While you'll find me in PRs and architecture reviews, the real highlight of my work is mentoring my team and watching them grow.

Here's the thing: my greatest accomplishment in my career isn't a technical deliverable or outcome. It's seeing my team's growth. Whether it's helping a new engineer ship their first major feature or watching someone I've mentored step into a leadership role, that's what drives me.

Recently, I architected a multi-channel AI ecosystem that I'm really proud of: a website chatbot powered by Vertex AI and Gemini, a Reddit bot, and a retail virtual assistant with voice capabilities using Eleven Labs voice cloning. I love diving into cloud architecture and AI/ML technologies. I'm AWS and Google Cloud certified.

Leadership & Impact

Driving technical excellence and measurable business outcomes through team leadership and strategic execution

Engineers Managed

3 direct + 4 indirect reports

Platform Development Team

Cost Reduction

AWS infrastructure optimization

$15K+ annual savings

0M+

Users Served

Award-winning campaign platform

99.9% uptime maintained

Faster Deployments

8 weeks → 2 weeks release cycle

DevOps transformation

Engineering Leadership

▸Lead platform development team of 4 engineers
▸Define technical roadmap balancing business needs with technical excellence
▸Mentor engineers on architecture, system design, and career growth
▸Drive architecture reviews and critical technical decisions

Delivery & Impact

▸Reduced deployment cycle from 8 weeks to 2 weeks (75% improvement)
▸Cut AWS costs by 31% through infrastructure optimization ($15K+ annual savings)
▸Led teams shipping award-winning platforms serving 1M+ users
▸Improved admin productivity by 40% through custom tooling

Notable Achievements

▸Architected multi-channel AI ecosystem using GCP Vertex AI and RAG systems

▸Led microservices adoption improving release frequency by 50%

▸Awarded Silver at 2025 American Advertising Awards for platform serving 1M+ users

▸Built collaborative engineering culture with focus on mentorship and continuous learning

Technical Expertise

Production experience across cloud platforms, AI/ML systems, and full-stack development

Cloud & Infrastructure

Production-scale cloud architecture and infrastructure management

AWS

Google Cloud

Terraform

Docker

AI & Machine Learning

Production AI systems with voice, vision, and language models

LLM Integration & Fine-tuning

RAG Systems

GCP Vertex AI

Eleven Labs (Voice AI)

Google Speech-to-Text

AWS Rekognition

Backend Development

Scalable server-side applications and APIs

Python

TypeScript

Node.js

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Frontend Development

Modern web applications and user interfaces

React

Next.js

TypeScript

Tailwind CSS

JavaScript

Education

Master of Science in Applied Computer Science

University of West Georgia

Bachelor of Science in Information Technology

Western Governors University

Certifications

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

Amazon Web Services

Google Cloud Certified Generative AI Leader

Google Cloud