JAMES MWAKICHAKO
Dallas,TX
Summary
Detail-oriented Principal Engineer with extensive experience in inspections, compliance, and team leadership. Proven ability to drive strategic planning initiatives and enhance operational efficiency, supported by a solid seven-year track record in the engineering sector. Committed to fostering collaborative environments that promote innovation and continuous improvement while maintaining a strong focus on quality and regulatory standards. Expertise will be leveraged in a dynamic organization that values growth and advancement opportunities.
Overview
10
10
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Principal Engineer I
McKinsey & Company
06.2025 - Current
- Architected a genAI solution in Azure to identify value leakage by comparing contract terms with incoming invoices. The solution was event-driven and leveraged Azure OpenAI, Function Apps, CosmosDB and Key Vault.
- Implemented an ETL pipeline using Azure Data Factory to ingest contracts and invoices from CLM and ERP solutions respectively.
- Led engineering teams to successfully complete projects on time and within budget.
- Reviewed plans, documents, and related materials to assess projected actions and advise on changes.
- Applied development best practices in daily tasks for efficiency and accuracy.
Senior Cloud Engineer II
McKinsey & Company
10.2021 - 06.2025
- Architected and implement an event-driven application for a financial services client on AWS using step-functions, lambdas and DynamoDB.
- Provided technical leadership and delivered innovative products and services to address customer specific requirements.
- Worked with teams of software engineers to define, build and maintain cloud infrastructure.
- Enabled Infrastructure as Code(IaC) using terraform for client looking to move 500+ workloads to the cloud
Technical Lead - Cloud Software Engineering
JP Morgan Chase & Co.
01.2021 - 10.2021
- Architect a Software Orchestration and Automation Response (SOAR) solution in AWS.
- Provide technical recommendations on design and implementation to establish best practices around running application on the cloud.
- Lead a team of 4 engineers in delivering a Software Orchestration and Automation Response (SOAR) solution on AWS.
- Work with my manager and product owner in coming up with deliverables and priorities for the team.
- Mentor incoming software developers and interns.
Cloud Software Engineer
JP Morgan Chase & Co.
05.2019 - 12.2020
- Develop tools and software that allows other developers to deploy, run and migrate their application securely to the cloud.
- Participate in complete software development life cycle (SDLC) process, which includes designing, implementing, debugging, fixing and maintaining automated test tools.
- Conduct technical and behavioral interview for incoming software developers and interns.
- Attend scrum meetings to review and plans project sprints.
Software Engineer
Dell Technologies
07.2017 - 05.2019
- Design implement and test scripts and tools in Python to automate testing of Dell Data Security product used in MACs for encryption and decryption.
- Analyze automated test results and report any bugs found in the product to development.
- Develop code in Apple Script to be able to communicate with Apple's operating system.
- Participate in project team discussions on product design and presenting test results to the development team and management.
- Increased test coverage of smoke and regression tests from 6% to 70% in 6 months using Python (pytest framework)
- Running automatic and manual smoke and regression tests and reporting results to appropriate stakeholders
- Successfully communicated cross-organization to develop and implement automation. This resulted in improving code quality and a 60% reduction in testing time
Automation Engineering Intern
HERE Technologies
05.2016 - 06.2017
Education
M.S - Data Science
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago05.2017
BSc - Applied Mathematics
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago05.2016
Certificate - Leadership Studies
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, IL01.2016
Skills
- Artificial Intelligence(AI): RAG, Langchain, Azure OpenAI
- PROGRAMMING: Python, JavaScript
- MACHINE LEARNING FRAMEWORKS: Tensorflow, PyTorch
- CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform(GCP)
- DATABASES: CosmosDB, SQL, Postgres, DynamoDB
- TESTING: Pytest, Jest, Playwright
- CODE MANAGEMENT: Agile Programming, Git, Jira, Jenkins, Gerrit, Bamboo
Certification
- Terraform Associate Certification Aug. 2022
- AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty Mar. 2022
- AWS Certified Associate June 2021
- AWS Certified Developer Mar. 2021
Timeline
Principal Engineer I
McKinsey & Company
06.2025 - Current
Senior Cloud Engineer II
McKinsey & Company
10.2021 - 06.2025
Technical Lead - Cloud Software Engineering
JP Morgan Chase & Co.
01.2021 - 10.2021
Cloud Software Engineer
JP Morgan Chase & Co.
05.2019 - 12.2020
Software Engineer
Dell Technologies
07.2017 - 05.2019
Automation Engineering Intern
HERE Technologies
05.2016 - 06.2017
M.S - Data Science
Illinois Institute of Technology
BSc - Applied Mathematics
Illinois Institute of Technology
Certificate - Leadership Studies
Illinois Institute of Technology