Malick Lawton
Senior Software Engineer
Baltimore,MD
Summary
Senior AI and Full-Stack Engineer with 10+ years of experience building scalable systems and production-ready AI solutions. Specialized in LLM-based applications, RAG systems, and data-centric AI workflows, with a strong track record of delivering high-impact products in healthcare, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise AI. Proven ability to lead teams, mentor engineers, and translate complex AI capabilities into real business outcomes.
Overview
10
10
years of professional experience
Work History
Senior Software Engineer
Snorkel AI
01.2025 - 03.2026
- Architected RAG pipeline evaluation inside Snorkel Flow, enabling retrieval-quality diagnostics, error bucketing, and targeted fine-tuning of embedding models for domain grounding.
- Codified programmatic labeling workflows using labeling functions and weak supervision, accelerating dataset curation and improving training-signal coverage without expanding manual annotation.
- Integrated LangChain with production connectors plus prompt evaluation, enabling rapid iteration on LLM features and regression tests across models, prompts, and data slices.
- Orchestrated durable AI agents using LangGraph state graphs, adding tool routing, human-in-the-loop approvals, and traceable execution for enterprise assistant workflows.
- Delivered multi-tenant REST APIs and React UI for labeling-function authoring, dataset review, and role-based access control, minimizing friction for SMEs and data scientists.
- Enhanced distributed job orchestration for labeling, evaluation, and fine-tuning workloads; added retries, idempotency guards, and observability to stabilize long-running pipelines.
- Hardened platform security by implementing audit logging, secrets management, and tenant-isolated storage policies, supporting regulated deployments and air-gapped foundation-model access.
- Refactored backend services into bounded contexts with clear contracts, shrinking deploy risk and enabling independent scaling of data ingestion, labeling, and evaluation components.
- Automated CI/ CD with contract tests, canary deployments, and backward-compatible migrations, reducing release regressions while boosting feature throughput for enterprise customers.
- Aligned cross-functional delivery by authoring design docs, uniting product, research, and platform teams, and translating research prototypes into maintainable services.
Senior Software Engineer
Tempus AI
01.2023 - 12.2024
- Spearheaded backend services for Tempus Hub, delivering secure test-order workflows, SSO integration, and clinician-facing APIs that surfaced genomic results, trial options, and care insights.
- Developed scalable data ingestion pipelines feeding Tempus Lens, normalizing de-identified multimodal records and enabling fast cohort queries through indexed schemas and resilient batch processing.
- Created 2024 generative-AI features for Tempus One-in-Lens, leveraging LLM prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, and evidence links to support trustworthy research cohort exploration.
- Engineered vector-search retrieval layer using embeddings and a vector database, improving document recall for cohort builder queries while keeping patient data access tightly governed.
- Established LangChain-based orchestration for prompt templates, tool calling, and evaluation, enabling rapid experimentation across models while standardizing observability and safety checks.
- Introduced LangGraph-based agent workflows in 2024 for internal operations, automating data-quality triage and ticket enrichment with controlled actions and human approval gates.
- Modernized frontend experiences in Hub and Lens with React and TypeScript, improving navigation, search responsiveness, and accessibility across desktop, mobile, and EHR-embedded views.
- Accelerated API performance via caching, pagination, and gRPC fanout, reducing time-to-first-result for clinician dashboards during high-volume test ordering and results review.
- Strengthened compliance posture by enhancing audit trails, consent-aware authorization, and secrets rotation, supporting HIPAA-aligned engineering practices across production environments and partner integrations.
Software Engineer
Thoughtworks
07.2019 - 12.2022
- Led cross-functional squads delivering microservices and web UIs for enterprise clients, translating business requirements into incremental releases via Agile practices and continuous delivery.
- Designed domain-driven service boundaries and API contracts, enabling independent deployment and reducing coupling while supporting high-throughput transactions and eventual consistency patterns.
- Assembled CI/ CD pipelines with GoCD, modeling multi-stage workflows, artifact promotion, and environment-specific configuration to achieve reliable deployments across QA, staging, and production.
- Crafted automated acceptance tests with Gauge, keeping specifications human-readable and executable, and integrating tests into pipelines to catch regressions before release cutoffs.
- Migrated monolith components to containerized services using Docker and Kubernetes, enabling horizontal scaling, reproducible local environments, and simplified operations handoffs across teams.
- Instituted observability standards with structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerting runbooks, accelerating incident response and tightening feedback loops to engineering teams.
- Refined database access layers with indexing, query tuning, and safe migrations, improving transactional reliability while maintaining backward compatibility for legacy integrations.
- Boosted frontend performance through code splitting, caching strategies, and API pagination, delivering faster page loads and smoother user flows on constrained networks.
- Standardized developer workflows by introducing reusable templates, linters, and pre-commit hooks, raising code quality and reducing review churn across multiple repositories.
- Mentored junior engineers through pair programming and design reviews, sharing best practices on testability, clean architecture, and pragmatic refactoring under tight deadlines.
Software Engineer
Amazon Web Services
01.2016 - 06.2019
- Shipped serverless request workflows using API Gateway, Lambda, and Step Functions, improving orchestration clarity while keeping failure handling explicit through retries and compensations.
- Scaled containerized backends on Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate, tuning task sizing, autoscaling policies, and load-balancer health checks to handle bursty traffic patterns.
- Constructed high-throughput data pipelines with Kinesis, SQS, and DynamoDB, ensuring at-least-once processing semantics and robust dead-letter handling for poisoned messages.
- Tuned service performance through profiling, concurrency controls, and caching layers, reducing p99 latency and stabilizing throughput during peak traffic events.
- Fortified security posture by enforcing IAM least privilege, rotating credentials, and validating input boundaries, supporting secure-by-default service operations at scale.
- Provisioned infrastructure with CloudFormation and scripted deployments, reducing configuration drift and enabling reproducible environments for integration testing and staging safely.
- Instrumented comprehensive metrics, dashboards, and alarms in CloudWatch, enabling faster on-call triage and data-driven postmortems for recurring incident classes worldwide.
- Reworked legacy modules into well-tested libraries with clear interfaces, lowering cognitive load and enabling faster onboarding for new engineers across teams.
Education
Bachelor's degree - Computer Science
Towson University
01.2015
Skills
- Python
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Go
- SQL
- FastAPI
- Nodejs
- Django
- Flask
- REST
- GraphQL
- Microservices
- LangSmith
- MLflow
- Weights & Biases
- Streamlit
- Gradio
- H2O Wave
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
- Redis
- Elasticsearch
- LLMs
- RAG
- LangChain
- LangGraph
- Vector Databases
- Prompt Engineering
- AI Agents
- React
- Nextjs
- Tailwind CSS
- AWS
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- CI/ CD
Websites
Languages
Python
TypeScript
JavaScript
Go
SQL
Timeline
Senior Software Engineer
Snorkel AI
01.2025 - 03.2026
Senior Software Engineer
Tempus AI
01.2023 - 12.2024
Software Engineer
Thoughtworks
07.2019 - 12.2022
Software Engineer
Amazon Web Services
01.2016 - 06.2019
Bachelor's degree - Computer Science
Towson University