John Aven

Engineering leader with 10+ years of balancing management and hands-on technical contribution. Experienced leading diverse teams of 5 to over 100 engineers while remaining deeply embedded in architecture decisions and production code. Security conscious, AI-empowering, and delivery driven – designing, building, deploying production systems across various infrastructure. Deep expertise across AWS, GCP, Azure, platform engineering, MLOps, and AI systems.

Head of Engineering at SymbyAI (2025-03 – Present)

• Established & nurtured technical vision and designed architecture, wrote code, and built the engineering team simultaneously
• Built extensible in-code pipeline execution framework from scratch with integrated distributed logging and visualization in a single developer pane – powering the bulk of our backend system
• Design & Built a multi-project, multi-environment GCP infrastructure using Terraform; established SOC2 compliance program to enable enterprise customer deployments
• Procured and integrated observability, security, and monitoring vendors — deliberately avoiding inhouse builds to move fast

Founder & Principal at snoodleboot, LLC (2023-02 – 2025-03)

• Embedded hands-on executive and principal engineer for 2+ years inside Fortune 100 client's engineering organization — mentoring and guiding 35+ engineers while remaining a direct technical contributor
• Architected, planned and delivered end-to-end deployment automation using ArgoCD and Azure DevOps across 6 products, 12+ services, and 15+ libraries, eliminating manual release processes entirely
• Designed and built a custom secrets management system from the ground up to fit the client's unique security and operational requirements
• Drove adoption of trunk-based development over GitHub Flow, replacing ad hoc branching with a disciplined, high-throughput model
• Shipped data contract enforcement, automated code quality pipelines (Ruff, Black), and self-service project scaffolding tooling — hands-on from design through deployment
• Owned full SDLC, DDLC, and DevOps modernization strategy while simultaneously mentoring engineers and running architectural governance, design sessions and product planning

Head of Engineering at Tellius, Inc. (2022-01 – 2022-11)

• Managed team of 35+ engineers globally while remaining close to the technical decisions — restructured team topology and overhauled dev/test practices to compress delivery timelines from months to weeks
• Delivered hybrid cloud-native BI product across AWS, Azure, and GCP; built out DevOps and compliance programs alongside the team
• Reorganized department from back-end/front-end silos to feature-oriented teams, improving cross-functional velocity
• Established DevOps and compliance programs ensuring a secured, automated, and maintainable hybrid SaaS product (AWS, Azure, GCP) – obtained SOC2 Certification
• Shifted QA from manual to SDET-focused automation and DevOps from manual scripts to a custom platform utilizing generic Helm charts – reducing deployment per-customer from hours to minutes

VP of Engineering at Mercury Data Science (2021-04 – 2021-12)

• Wore every hat at once — product manager, engineering lead, practice head, and sales engineer — during a consulting firm's pivot toward ML product development – focus on MLOps Platform
• Built and mentored onshore/nearshore team of 30+ while defining the product roadmap and technical strategy
• Established Data Engineering practice around tools such as dbt, argo Workflows and other standard tools of the time

Director of Engineering at Hashmap, Inc. (2019-05 – 2021-04)

• Developed internal product lab – building tools to accelerate and assist in standardized consulting projects (ml engineering, data migration, and so on)
• Set engineering standards; established knowledge management programs across a 120+ person international organization
• Ran the Sales Engineering department in coordination with sales and marketing teams. Developed key customer relationships and presented Snowflake demos at Snowflake events.

Sr. Engineer & Architect & Data Scientist at Caserta Concepts (2018-08 – 2019-04)

• Designed and built data transformation pipeline solution to facilitate data engineering engagements
• Consulted on key major cancer research center cloud project, ultimately winning firms largest-to-date contract and establishing standard for project assessment format and report
• Engaged in sales engineering and assisted in behind-the-scenes assessment reviews while on the bench and when requested

Lead Data Engineer at Sanchez Oil & Gas (2017-02 – 2018-08)

• Managed greenfield team to establish and build out data platform
• Interfaced with corporate stakeholders, data science teams and performed vendor interviews to identify potential solution integrations

Geophysicist at CGG (2013-10 – 2014-06)

Developed and applied seismic image processing algorithms to build images of the earth's subsurface — designed custom algorithms to recover signal from otherwise unusable data and extend field-of-survey coverage.

Principal Research Data Scientist at ViaLogy (2011-05 – 2013-06)

Led and contributed hands-on to R&D of machine learning-assisted remote signal processing algorithms targeted at hydrocarbon identification from seismic surveys, production records, and well-log surveys.

Fetzer-Franklin Research Postdoctoral Fellow at National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) (2010-01 – 2011-04)

Researched, designed and built software for nonlinear signal analysis of MEG and EEG brain data, applying novel techniques from nonlinear dynamics and statistical mechanics — research and implementation both hands-on.

PhD in Computational Science – San Diego State University & Claremont Graduate University (2006 – 2009)

MS in Applied Mathematics – San Diego State University (2004 – 2006)

BS in Applied Mathematics – San Diego State University (2000 – 2003)