Ian Cates

I'm a data engineer and full-stack engineer with 4+ years building and integrating serverless data platforms on the cloud. My passions live at the intersection of three things: data, full-stack development, and security. Most of the work ends up touching all three at once.

The shape of what I build is intentionally end-to-end. ELT/ETL processes and DAG platforms, API services, operator portals, and the infrastructure-as-code that ships them all sit on the same canvas. The engineer who designs the pipeline writes the dashboard the data lands in. I enjoy impactful work: the kind that gets noticed and makes meaningful changes.

Beyond any specific stack, I'm genuinely fascinated by how the practice of building software is changing. The pre-AI discipline I came up on still grounds the work: careful modules, slow-and-correct review, deep observability. I treat agentic coding workflows as a first-class production system in their own right, with prompts, evals, telemetry, and review held to the same bar as everything else. Knowing when to lean on these tools and when to slow down is its own challenge, and one that only matters more as the field continues to shift.

My cybersecurity background never stopped influencing how I build. Least-privilege access, federated SSO, secret rotation, and encryption everywhere are second nature at this point. That security lens shapes every design choice in the data work: who can read this, how does it rotate, what's the blast radius.

B.S. Cybersecurity (2021) · AWS Certified Data Engineer (2024) · AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional (2025)