Seattle, WA — AI/ML Engineer

Skyler Carlson

Principal, Intelligence Engineering at Slalom. Ten years spanning systems engineering, machine learning, and production agentic platforms — building MCP servers, agentic workflows, and serverless/k8s full-stack applications on AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Selected work GitHub LinkedIn

50%LLM inference cost reduction via Bedrock batch pipelines

~$1M/yrsaved automating root-cause analysis workflows with AI

2U.S. patents — voice fingerprinting & RF signal separation

10 yrssystems engineering → data science & machine learning → agentic AI

Selected Work

2016 — present

Occultation chords: parallel colored lines, one per observer, crossing the silhouette of an asteroid against a field of stars.

Case study · 2025 — present

IOTA Hub

Sole developer of a serverless platform for a citizen-science astronomy organization — cut scientific data review from months to days for downstream consumers like NASA and ESA.

Astro/VueFastAPIAWSTerraformRead the case study

2026 — present

Deep-research agent platform

Engineering lead for a zero-to-one agentic system performing deep research and report writing. MCP servers plus agentic data-visualization and mapping capabilities.

MCPAgentsData viz & mapping

2025

Agentic Workflow Accelerator

Core contributor to Slalom’s cloud-agnostic agentic workflow engine — built MCP server capabilities and agent isolation functionality used across client engagements.

Agentic workflowsMCPAgent isolation

2024 — 2026

Production GenAI at Fortune 500 scale

Matured a beta GenAI application into a production MLOps platform while halving inference spend; separately built an event-driven personalization service that lifted email clickthrough 85%.

BedrockStep FunctionsMLOps

About

I'm passionate about building AI, ML, and automation-forward solutions to salient business problems. I'm a big-picture thinker who connects AI/ML to tangible business impact, then owns the whole stack to get it shipped — architecture, infrastructure, application code. I develop with Claude Code daily and thrive at the intersection of people, process, and automation.

Outside of work, I love to spend time outdoors! I spent six years as a mountain rescue technician in southern Arizona — 130+ missions with the Southern Arizona Rescue Association. These days I enjoy running (roads and trail) and exploring the Washington mountains. I also enjoy building software in my free time, tinkering with home automation, and gardening.

Experience & Education

résumé, abridged

Slalom

2024 — present

2026 — present
Principal, Intelligence Engineering
Engineering lead for an agentic deep-research platform for an AI infrastructure client — hands-on from architecture through production code to delivery.
2024 — 2026
Machine Learning Architect
Core contributor to the Agentic Workflow Accelerator; cut a Fortune 500 client’s LLM inference spend by 50%; led a team of three on an AI-accelerated legacy modernization with Codex. AI SME shaping agentic solution patterns in Azure AI Foundry for enterprise clients.

General Dynamics Mission Systems

2016 — 2024

2022 — 2024
Advanced Data Scientist
AI/ML Center of Excellence. Led a team of three running an enterprise RAG system with thousands of users; ~2x improvement in radio signal collision separation with neural networks.
2020 — 2022
Senior Data Scientist
Semantic segmentation for document layout analysis; object detection on synthetic aperture radar imagery; Python tooling for automated reporting.
2016 — 2020
Systems Engineer → Senior Systems Engineer
Automated ~50% of root-cause analysis ticket workflows with AI (~$1M/yr saved); SME for data servers and SQL operations across 30+ sites.

Education

2013 — 2021

2018 — 2021
M.S., Data Science
Johns Hopkins University
Machine learning and advanced machine learning, computational statistics, statistical models and regression, algorithms for data science, and stochastic differential equations.
2013 — 2016
B.S., Systems Engineering
The University of Arizona
Minor in Mathematics. Dean's List with Distinction; senior design team leader for an autonomous-vehicle testbed for GNC algorithm testing.