Armen Yampolsky

Engineering leader who modernizes how teams work. I absorb emerging technology early, prove it hands-on, put it into production, then rewrite the operating procedures around what it makes newly possible: automating the routine work, and broadening the scope of what the team can take on. The result is a team working to shared standards rather than a group of engineers each working their own way.

Much of that work is translation: reconciling what a system can do against what clients, non-technical stakeholders, and the business need, then getting a cross-functional group to commit to the tradeoff. I build those teams as well as the systems — hiring, training, writing the standards they work to, and making research into new technology a standing part of how the team operates.

Director of Technology at Accertify, Inc. (2017-07 – 2026-01)

Led client solutions engineering for Accertify's Device Intelligence product line — combining deep product ownership, client-facing technical authority, and continuous R&D to stay ahead of a rapidly evolving fraud landscape.

• Pioneered production AI tooling at Accertify, building the company's first LLM-based systems on top of a newly available internal model. Built a RAG system (Python, ChromaDB) that reduced onboarding time by 40% and empowered support teams to resolve complex queries independently. Deployed MCP tools for natural-language queries against Prometheus, JIRA, and internal data sources, replacing fragile scripts with agentic automation. Work adopted as the reference architecture for company-wide AI platform expansion.
• Designed and deployed PySpark analytics frameworks processing 500M+ daily transaction records. Built data infrastructure (ETL, S3 event streams, SNS/SQS workflows) supporting fraud detection across millions of global transactions. Internal tooling achieved 100% adherence to 24-hour SLAs for new client provisioning worldwide.
• Replaced brittle hard-coded fraud logic with an ML-driven Drools rules engine integrated into the BDD/Cucumber CI/CD pipeline — instant rule updates for 97% of clients without code deployments.
• Led hands-on client integration for Accertify's iOS and Android SDKs across native and cross-platform apps (React Native, Xamarin, Cordova). First technical escalation point for complex failures — reproducing issues, isolating SDK conflicts, and feeding findings into product and QA work. Architected Bank of America's on-prem-to-SaaS middleware migration without loss of device history.
• Built, led, and retained a multi-continental technical-support and client-solutions-engineering team (US and Spain) through two corporate acquisitions — by American Express and subsequently by AKKR — with zero critical talent loss at either transition.

Architect & Technical Manager at NBCUniversal Media, LLC (2008-02 – 2016-07)

• Ran engineering execution for the dotMedia (.media) initiative — a $100M enterprise digital asset management platform managing Universal's entire film and episodic library. Led the development organization: user story quality, QA methodology, Scrum process, vendor and stack decisions, and offshore engineering coordination (India). Team of 40 across disciplines.
• Designed and implemented the automated digital supply chain that replaced legacy physical workflows, increasing processing throughput by 60% and cutting campaign launch timelines for marketing and distribution teams.
• Served as dual Technical Manager and UX Architect. Rewrote legacy QC logging tools to reflect actual production user behavior, significantly reducing error rates.
• Initiated an R&D program within the engineering org: rules engine for source-selection automation, WebSphere SCA components enabling workflows to assemble dynamically at runtime, and parallelized regression-test execution across nodes (SoapUI/Groovy).
• Standardized the department-wide build pipeline on Maven/Jenkins/Nexus — migrating projects from Ant — and introduced Clover code-coverage and PMD static analysis. Led Linux VM snapshot standardization in Chef.

Associate Director at Fitch Ratings (2001-03 – 2007-10)

• Designed and built an API monetization platform generating $10M+ in annual revenue in its first year — opening a new business line that the firm continues to operate.
• Architected a distributed computing grid to parallelize predictive quantitative models, reducing simulation runtimes from days to hours — analysts could now run scenarios previously considered impractical.
• Established Fitch's IT R&D group. Introduced the firm's first identity management (SSO) framework and enterprise coding standards.
• Wrote and published enterprise-wide coding, architecture, and UI standards. Established a Java/J2EE education initiative for developers; ran technology seminars for senior management.

Senior Developer at AxiomSL (1998-04 – 2001-01)

• Developed multi-threaded visualization UIs for distributed CORBA risk management systems serving Tier-1 financial institutions.

Consultant at Renaissance Worldwide (1996-04 – 1998-03)

• Early pioneer in web-based knowledge management systems for Fortune 500 clients.

Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy – Northwestern University