About

Ethan Zaruba-Walker

I'm bridging the gap between what humans need and what technology can deliver.

Coding and technology were the start. School turned that into data science and cognitive science, and the work today is human-agent business systems.

Design-thinking interviews, use cases, and process mapping show me the work. I rebuild it with business analysis, data science, ML pipelines, agentic systems, and AI enablement. My background spans data and AI engineering at IBM, healthcare machine learning, and my own consulting practice.

I'm looking for a technical sales role: remote, or San Francisco based with travel. If you are hiring that seat, write me.

Discovery & process mappingData platformsAI systemsWorkflow automationEnablement

ethan@zwconsultingllc.net · LinkedIn · GitHub · Instagram

Experience

What happened, and what I took from it

Each role starts with the situation, then a task, action, and result you can scan. A link appears only when a published deep dive supports the claim.

Oct 2023–present · Staff Room AI

Founder & consultant · Staff Room AI

Discovery & solution designFirst-of-kind architectureIntegrations & AI configurationDeployment leadershipAdoption & handoffReusable delivery assets

Small operators needed AI systems that matched how work actually moved, and they did not have an in-house team to build them. Each engagement had to end with operators who could keep the system running.

Task. Own discovery through training, and leave a system the client can run.

Action. Mapped the work, built Notion and automation systems, and trained operators at handoff.

Result. Ingestion capacity +99.8% and cost −86%; operators took over the systems.

Aug 2018–Dec 2020 · IBM

Cognitive software and data engineer · IBM

Discovery & solution designIntegrations & AI configurationDeployment leadershipAdoption & handoffReusable delivery assets

Support engineers lost hours preparing client logs before they could analyze a case. Past resolutions were just as hard to find, buried outside the channel where the work already happened.

Task. Surface past resolutions and usable logs inside existing support tools.

Action. Ran discovery with support teams, then shipped a Slack case-matcher and a log pipeline.

Result. Common problems resolved in one Slack response; log-analysis effort fell by an order of magnitude.

May–Aug 2021 · Valhalla Healthcare

Machine learning engineer (intern) · Valhalla Healthcare

Discovery & solution designFirst-of-kind architectureIntegrations & AI configurationReusable delivery assets

Clinicians recorded care in handwritten notes that never became a record the rest of the work could use.

Task. Turn handwritten clinical notes into a data model other workflows could use.

Action. Researched the pipeline, trained a Keras and TensorFlow model, and packaged it in Docker.

Result. Handwritten notes entered an extensible data model at F1 80.03.

May–Jul 2022 · Wiz Music · Barcelona

Community development intern · Wiz Music · Barcelona

Discovery & solution designField-to-product feedback

A music startup read its Discord member count as growth, but the join sources did not support that story. Artists, the reason people would stay, were missing from the server.

Task. Show what the membership data actually said, then test one fix.

Action. Segmented joins by source, raised the inorganic pattern, and shipped an artist AMA.

Result. The team corrected its baseline, and the AMA shipped as a paid artist perk.

Contact

If you are building a system that has to work for the people doing the job, write me and tell me what is stuck.

ethan@zwconsultingllc.net

Résumé

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