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Résumé

Owen Richards

Full-stack engineer who ships production AI

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Summary

Software engineer with 3 years building production AI/LLM systems and high-scale backend platforms at CoStar Group. Re-architected an internal agentic AI platform, cutting the codebase ~75%, and engineered the marketing-automation platform reaching millions of contacts across 7+ marketplaces. Full-stack from React/TypeScript front ends to distributed backends; pursuing an M.S. in Computer Science (Machine Learning) at Georgia Tech.

Experience

CoStar Group

Jul 2023 – Present

Richmond, VA · Hybrid

Software Engineer II — promoted twice (Associate → SWE I → SWE II)

  • Re-architected the CoStar AI Platform backend (Python 3.12), so new agents are declarative JSON definitions instead of hand-written Python: they ship faster, more teams build on the platform, regressions dropped, and new engineers ramp sooner. The codebase shrank ~75% while doing more.
  • Built retrieval-augmented agents on AWS Bedrock (Claude) with hybrid semantic + keyword retrieval for grounded, cited answers over proprietary data.
  • Authored the platform's technical execution plan and a competitive study of the real-estate AI landscape to set backend architecture and roadmap direction.
  • Engineered the centralized marketing-automation platform (C# / .NET microservices, SQL Server, Snowflake, Elasticsearch, Redis) powering all marketing operations for CoStar and its companies: GDPR-compliant outreach to millions of contacts across 7+ real-estate marketplaces, via Salesforce, LinkedIn, and Google Analytics.
  • Built event-driven enrollment pipelines (AWS Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, Kafka) for the $1B Homes.com marketing initiative, reliably ingesting and routing millions of contacts into automated marketing journeys.
  • Shipped full-stack React / TypeScript / GraphQL features with multi-language support for CoStar's global marketplace expansion.

nCino

May 2022 – Sep 2022

Wilmington, NC

Software Engineer, DevOps Intern

  • Built CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code across 30+ product teams (AWS, GitHub Actions); authored custom Datadog Lambda metrics that cut cloud spend ~$100K annually.
  • Launched a centralized developer hub in the build pipeline and rolled out Bandit security scanning across the organization.

Pervasive Communication Lab — UVA

Aug 2021 – May 2023

Charlottesville, VA

Machine Learning Research Assistant

  • Built deep-learning pipelines for the NIH-funded Cloud-based Patient Outcome Platform (with Emory and Harvard), optimizing GPU data parallelism to accelerate model training on large-scale healthcare data.

University of Virginia

Aug 2021 – May 2023

Charlottesville, VA

Teaching Assistant · Head TA, Database Systems (2022–23)

  • Supported 100+ students and deployed 10+ class projects on Google Cloud.

Selected projects

FieldDay

Oct 2025 – Present

owenlrichards.com/fieldday (code private) →

Founder & Sole Engineer

  • A “participation operating system” for real-world activities: a platform connecting people, organizations, and sponsors around physical activities. Owning architecture, data model, and deployment end to end.
  • Stack: Bun, Express + tRPC, Drizzle ORM, PostgreSQL 18 + PostGIS, Typesense, and a Next.js / React + Tailwind / shadcn front end in a TypeScript Nx monorepo.
  • Implemented hybrid semantic search with pgvector (halfvec(1536) HNSW indexes fused via reciprocal-rank fusion), with privacy controls modeled as a PIPA superset.

Technical skills

Languages

  • Python
  • C# / .NET
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • SQL

AI / ML

  • LangGraph
  • AWS Bedrock (Claude)
  • RAG
  • Hybrid retrieval (kNN + BM25)
  • OpenSearch
  • pgvector
  • PyTorch

Backend

  • Node.js
  • Express
  • tRPC
  • GraphQL
  • Microservices
  • PostgreSQL / PostGIS
  • DynamoDB
  • Snowflake
  • Redis
  • Drizzle ORM
  • Kafka

Cloud / Ops

  • AWS (Lambda, ECS, S3, SQS, API GW, IAM)
  • Docker
  • Terraform
  • CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
  • Datadog

Frontend

  • React
  • Next.js
  • TanStack
  • Tailwind
  • shadcn/ui
  • D3.js

Education

Georgia Institute of Technology

M.S. Computer Science — Machine Learning

Aug 2024 – Present

University of Virginia

B.S. Computer Science · Engineering Business minor · GPA 3.92

Aug 2019 – May 2023