stranger.dev

Senior data & AI platforms for high-stakes environments.

Direct engagements across gaming, financial services, defense, and entertainment. Delivered into Fortune-class end-customers.

Riot Games ·Databricks ·General Dynamics ·Aerial Insights

Selected work

Riot Games Senior Data Engineer · 3.5 years

$3M/yr compute reduction at petabyte scale

Re-architected core PySpark ETL on Databricks; led the dbt migration; built an AI-assisted code-review tool that won the internal hackathon and entered production use.
Databricks SME · Active

Lead authority on enterprise customer engagements.

Embedded with a Fortune 100 entertainment client. Reference architectures, migration frameworks, dbt integration, AI/ML productionization. Field input back to Databricks engineering.
Aerial Insights AI Founding Engineer · equity-retained

Patent-pending CV stack for aerial-imagery roofing detection.

Shipped Gen 1 + Gen 2 to production. Inventor on USPTO provisional 63/868,030 — discontinued shingle detection from satellite imagery. Equity stake retained post-handoff.

Data Platform Assessment

2–4 weeks

Paid discovery that produces a real deliverable: current-state audit, future-state architecture, phased plan, cost projection.
Lakehouse Architecture & Build

4–10 weeks

Production-grade lakehouse on Databricks. Medallion layers, Delta tables, IaC, dbt where it fits. Milestone-based delivery, runbook + support window.
AI/ML Engineering

2–8 months

Production AI systems end-to-end: feature pipelines, training infra, inference serving, RAG/agents. Most AI projects fail on data infrastructure, not models — this engagement covers both.
Fractional CTO

Ongoing · 3-month minimum

Senior technical leadership for strategic decisions — architecture, hiring, roadmap, board diligence — without the full-time hire.