Andrew
DiCosmo

A live AI-enabled SaaS marketplace for collectors: computer vision recognition, OCR, live market pricing, and a social layer with leaderboards. I design and build its recognition and OCR workflows, cloud AI service integrations, backend data flows, API integrations, and production architecture. The approach favors bounded recognition, pricing, and workflow services so AI output is useful without turning every step into an open-ended agent loop. See how it works in the demo below.

A private Shopify repricing system where an LLM recommends prices, but deterministic policy and validation code control every write. The model gets an opinion; the guardrails get the final say.

An in-development business-operations platform. The current work focuses on shared customer and hiring workflows, with AI-assisted matching, drafting, and planning. Additional modules are on the roadmap. See the concept view below.

After BlackSky ended in March 2023, Citizens Bank became my primary role. The work began through a company-to-company engagement and later converted to W-2, effectively a contract-to-hire progression. I served as the Azure security subject matter expert for the content engineering team, owned the Azure security product workstream, and supported adoption of Azure Advanced Threat Protection, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, and the broader Microsoft security suite. I also took on QRadar work outside the original Azure scope, helped the team write Splunk detection rules during the migration from QRadar, and built an early Detection as Code prototype that used source control for change history, recovery, and rule restoration. Later work included Microsoft Purview data flowing into Splunk.

Completed C2C subcontractor engagement supporting FDIC as the end customer across more than 60 Azure subscriptions. I encoded the agency's customized security benchmark into Azure Policy controls, built reusable PowerShell governance modules, and operationalized the process through GitHub Actions. The workflow checked configuration drift, generated compliance evidence, updated findings, supported remediation, and reduced analysis that could take most of a business day to under a minute. The result was a repeatable compliance engineering process instead of a manual point-in-time investigation. The work also included Splunk correlation searches and AI-governance policy as the agency adopted AI.

C2C subcontractor engagements supporting Fortive, HCSC, and Guidestone as end customers: deployed and configured Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Identity, reducing attack surface across corporate environments. Led Azure ATP implementations for real time threat detection, integrated Splunk and QRadar with the Defender stack across hybrid environments, and built Defender policy and automated security responses across the three end clients.

As BlackSpoke's cloud lead, migrated DOJ Justice Management Division datacenter workloads into Azure. On NGA's Corporate Analytic Visualization Environment (CAVE) program, I helped the NGA team understand, maintain, and build out a data warehousing platform after the prime contract win while also leading two teams that built mission microservices. The BlackSpoke work included hands-on software development for API-backed microservices, imagery cataloging, retrieval, and data-access workflows supporting computer vision, geospatial, and intelligence use cases. Earlier BlackSpoke and BlackSky services ran as Kubernetes-based microservices on EC2 and migrated to AWS EKS as the EKS environment came online. Later, through CloudTect work for NGA under BlackSpoke, we migrated a web/API/database microservice from Kubernetes containers to OpenShift, changing deployment from Terraform-managed infrastructure to Docker images, Helm, private container repositories, and GitLab runners. The platform work also used Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana/Elasticsearch, Lambda, NiFi, SQL, Oracle, and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), with ETL and API workflows supporting petabyte-scale geospatial data across 30+ sources.

At BlackSky Technology (NYSE: BKSY), worked on Spectra, an AI-enabled space-intelligence platform that fused satellite imagery with SAR, RF, GPS, and IoT sensor data for object, change, and anomaly detection and site monitoring. The work included PyTorch and TensorFlow detection models, a continued NGA AWS microservices contract, and an IARPA program. Platform work used EKS-based microservices, Docker, Helm, Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana/Elasticsearch, and Airflow to monitor container performance, tune CPU utilization, and support scaling decisions. The visual on this site is an original illustration, not client material.

The largest production AI application I have worked on was a multi-year modernization of an existing cleared mission application. I led two delivery teams rearchitecting services on AWS using Well-Architected principles and loosely coupled microservices behind APIs. My teams owned Python API services end to end; I later worked alongside Java backend services in the same environment. The program operated at petabyte scale, with data warehousing measured in billions of records and continuous structured and unstructured ingest supporting mission-focused AI/ML, computer-vision, and geospatial workflows.

At HARMAN, I led the architecture and application design for the original Sherlock AI product and worked hands-on with two other talented developers to build it as a rapid prototype. Sherlock AI combined data scraping, machine learning, and predictive analytics to analyze market signals for build-versus-buy decisions and guide R&D investment. The platform continued in internal use after my departure. Built on Microsoft cloud services, Sherlock AI received a 2016 Digital Leader Award from IDG and Dimension Data.

C2C subcontractor engagement supporting NIKE as the end customer. Built a five year technology roadmap for NIKE's corporate information security team covering application security, cloud platform security, encryption and certificate management, vulnerability management, and penetration testing, and integrated CloudWatch, Rapid7, and AlienVault across 40+ Azure and AWS subscriptions.

As ByteCubed's Principal Big Data Architect, led an engineering team building big data platform solutions at scale, with DHS among the customers served. Owned software architectures, coding standards, code reviews, and the technical direction that kept feature delivery on time.

Eleven years teaching nights while building days: Visual Basic, Java, C#, C++, and Ethical Hacking, plus a seat on the IT advisory board. Also served as an exam development Subject Matter Expert for CompTIA and Microsoft. Explaining systems is how you find out if you understand them.

My own shop: custom desktop, web, and mobile apps for small and medium businesses, SharePoint and ASP.NET builds, network design, and cloud work that was early for its time: refactoring client applications to run in AWS and Azure and standing up DevOps pipelines for them. The anchor engagement was running IT for a group of eight affiliated companies, migrating all 300 users off Lotus Notes onto hosted Exchange 2007, and replacing their aging Access/SQL ERP with a Java and Oracle system with handhelds, cutting real cost in a crisis economy.

Handled the complete internal technology function, from break-fix support and infrastructure through ERP workflows and custom software. I built a validated material-record system and connected it to ERP shipping output, eliminating a tedious manual printing step and saving approximately 80 to 125 hours per year. I also automated plant-manager job-cost review from roughly one hour per job to a button-driven process across approximately 15 to 30 completed jobs per day, making profitability problems and data-entry errors visible much sooner. After leaving as a W-2 employee, I continued providing part-time and occasional onsite support for roughly 15 years, then helped train and transition responsibility to the internal IT team.