Brent Burgess

Brent Burgess

Data Architect. Data architect who ships AI automation.

Benicia, California · brent@brentburgess.com · LinkedIn · GitHub · brentburgess.com

Summary

Data and AI leader with 21 years in data, 18 of them in enterprise data architecture and 7 leading data engineering, machine learning and analytics teams.

At Wine.com I grew from Lead Data Architect to Director of Data and Analytics and built the data foundation that planning, finance and operations ran on, then the forecasting, anomaly detection and production AI agents on top of it.

Selected results

Selected systems

Running today, with the evidence on this site.

Experience

Work history, most recent employer first.

Wine.com

Director of Data and Analytics · Senior Data Engineering Manager · Lead Data Architect
San Francisco, California, to

  • Set the technical direction and roadmap as product owner of the data platform: priorities, risk, the platform budget, build-versus-buy, vendor contracts and the investment cases I defended with the executive team.
  • Replaced an on-premise SQL Server, SSAS and SSIS estate, domain by domain, with a medallion lakehouse on AWS and Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Spark, Redshift, S3): change data capture from more than 20 source systems, Airflow, Terraform, CI/CD, parity checks before every cutover, and 99.9% uptime across five years.
  • Ran a data products program with named domains, owners, published interfaces and contracts for schema, freshness and quality, with self-healing checks that quarantined bad records and backfilled them, and designed one certified metric layer, with an owner, grain and lineage on every definition, that finance, operations, product and marketing reported from.
  • Led forecasting and predictive modeling to production: demand and volume forecasting, propensity and churn models, a feature store, model serving, drift monitoring and retraining, and anomaly detection with KPI alerting on statistical process control limits.
  • Built the supply chain and operations data behind planning (delivery, fulfillment, inventory, purchasing, spend, an ERP migration), the leadership scorecards and the financial reporting layer for FP&A, and retired Power BI onto governed Tableau and Sigma.
  • Shipped production AI agents for internal tooling, a business workflow and a customer-facing feature, with tool calling, multi-agent orchestration and MCP servers that give agents governed access to data, and set the standards they run under: SSO and OAuth, least-privilege access, PII rules, monitoring, cost discipline and human-in-the-loop review, including in a Claude Code development suite.
  • Hired, coached and developed a distributed team of 7, growing engineers into lead and manager roles, while writing production SQL, PySpark and Terraform and setting data standards adopted across more than 8 engineering teams.

UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education

Lead Data Architect
Berkeley, California, to

  • Designed and delivered the data warehouse for the DRDP statewide pre-kindergarten to kindergarten assessment platform used across California public schools, alongside psychometric researchers and under public-sector privacy and security constraints.

Bluenet Technologies

Lead Data Architect
Tampa, Florida, to

  • Customer-facing lead architect in a consultancy across 5 client organizations and more than 100 databases, advising client CTOs, CIOs and CDOs on data strategy, architecture and investment trade-offs, and delivering executive reporting and Cognos analytics for healthcare, insurance and industrial clients.

Quality Distribution

Data Architect · Lead Data Engineer
Tampa, Florida, to

  • Designed analytical databases and BI for logistics and fleet operations at a NASDAQ-listed bulk logistics company: dispatch, fleet utilization, terminal and safety reporting, truck telematics at volume, financial reporting under SOX and ITGC controls, and benefits claims reporting with automated de-identification of PHI.

Lifestyle Family Fitness

Senior DBA · Data Engineer
St. Petersburg, Florida, to

  • Administered and optimized SQL Server environments and built the first data integration and reporting infrastructure for a multi-site membership business: member activity, retention and billing reporting.

Skills

Data architecture
Data architecture, Data engineering, Medallion lakehouse, Databricks on AWS (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Spark, Feature Store, MLflow), Redshift, S3, Glue, Lambda, Batch and near-real-time CDC ingestion, Apache Airflow, Terraform, CI/CD
AI automation
AI automation, Agent development with tool calling, Model Context Protocol, Multi-agent orchestration, Claude Code, LLM features in production, SSO and OAuth for AI tools, LLM observability and cost management, Human-in-the-loop governance
Decision intelligence and ML
Demand and volume forecasting, Time series, Propensity and churn models, Anomaly detection, Statistical process control, Feature pipelines, model serving, drift monitoring and retraining
Governance and metadata
Unity Catalog (lineage, classification, RBAC), Certified semantic and metric layers, Data contracts, Self-healing quality checks, CCPA and GDPR, PCI DSS, SOX and ITGC, HIPAA and PHI
Analytics and BI
Analytics and BI, Tableau, Sigma, Power BI, Cognos, Executive scorecards
Languages and tools
SQL (Spark SQL, T-SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL), Python, PySpark, C# and .NET, dbt, DuckDB
Leadership
Data and AI strategy, Roadmap and backlog ownership, Platform budget and investment cases, Vendor evaluation and contract negotiation, Hiring, coaching and performance management

Education