Haminata Camara

Engineer and technical founder with 7+ years at American Express across platform engineering, SRE and production operations, now founder and technical lead of an LLM-powered consumer product taken from discovery to production rollout solo. Experienced in owning end-to-end delivery — discovery, technical scoping, system design, build and rollout — and in making pragmatic trade-offs between scope, speed and quality to protect delivery. Deep understanding of how model behaviour affects product experience, built the hard way: designing when to use LLM generation and when not to in a trust-critical domain.

Six years of customer-impact incident management brings calm and clear communication when stakes are high.

Founder & Technical Lead - Point of Prayer

(2026-03)

Community platform with live video rooms and LLM-powered content | React/TypeScript, Supabase (Postgres, Auth, RLS, Edge Functions), Daily.co WebRTC, LLM APIs

• Own end-to-end delivery of a production system solo — discovery, scoping, system design, build and production rollout — taking the product from concept to pre-launch in under five months while making continuous scope/speed/quality trade-offs to protect delivery.
• Built and deployed an LLM-powered system and learned first-hand how model behaviour shapes product experience: architected a hybrid design serving human-vetted content for predictable inputs and reserving LLM generation for open-ended input only — controlling quality, tone risk and inference cost in a sensitive domain.
• Build full-stack in production-grade TypeScript/JavaScript: React PWA frontend, Postgres data model with row-level security, serverless edge functions for secret handling and token issuance, and WebRTC video integration with active-speaker detection, in-call chat and role-based access.
• Practise customer-led discovery: designed a ministry/congregation partnership go-to-market, deliberately deferring speculative features until validated by real partner needs — solution design starts with the user's workflow, not assumptions.
• Make and document sound decisions under ambiguity: every architecture choice (build-vs-buy for video, AI-vs-deterministic content, PWA-vs-native) recorded with rationale and trade-offs — codifying working patterns for future contributors.
• Shipped privacy and security by design: GDPR Article 9 special-category data handling, tokenised third-party access via edge functions, and RLS on every table.

Service Assurance Engineer - American Express - London

(2020-03 - 2026-03)

Global Technology Operations Services | Dynatrace, Splunk, Moogsoft, ServiceNow

• Owned service health across customer-facing production systems at enterprise scale, embedding with engineering, DevOps and business teams to clarify impact, dependencies and priorities — customer-facing technical work under real stakes.
• Modelled calm and judgment in high-stakes incidents: led triage and root-cause analysis on customer-impacting outages, communicating clearly with engineers, product teams and business stakeholders while systems were degraded.
• Codified working patterns into runbooks, SOPs and playbooks adopted across support teams — turning individual knowledge into building blocks others could use.
• Built Splunk and Dynatrace dashboards and alerting/automation workflows that reduced detection time and customer impact; spotted risks early and drove preventative engineering actions from field findings.
• Embedded operational readiness into Agile delivery — ensuring new services shipped with monitoring, supportability, failure-mode analysis and non-functional requirements, sharpening how teams learned from production.

Technology Graduate Engineer - American Express - London

(2018-09 - 2020-03)

Global Benefits & Loyalty platforms | Java, Spring Boot/Batch, Kafka, Zookeeper, AWS S3, Cucumber

• Contributed to refactoring a legacy monolith into a Kafka-connected microservices architecture — service boundaries, asynchronous flows and operational risk in a complex production estate.
• Built a GDPR compliance tool erasing cancelled cards across membership rewards systems, processing high-volume records reliably with Spring Batch; implemented AWS S3 delivery flows and Moogsoft/ServiceNow health alerting.
• Analysed bank-partner integrations and wrote BDD acceptance scenarios, converting expected behaviour and edge cases into testable coverage.

Consular Intern - Sierra Leone Embassy

(2015 - 2016)

Supported visa and passport applicants by translating complex policy into clear guidance — early customer-facing experience with non-specialist audiences.

MSc - Computing and Information Systems - Queen Mary University of London

BSc - International Relations - Kingston University