Miguel Pereira

Miguel
Pereira

Practice leader for data platforms and applied AI, still close to the code.

My career started in 1998 as a sales engineer. After moving to the US in 2001, I went from sysadmin to DBA to building data and AI platforms, and today I lead a consulting practice that turns data estates into AI systems in production. I architect, review and build, and I'm a perennial tinkerer across advanced networking, data platforms, applied AI, process optimization and ideation.

Practice Director, Cloud Acceleration at Protagona · 7 AWS certifications earned since 2016

Talk to me about data platform modernization, getting GenAI into production, or AWS for nonprofits. Message me on LinkedIn

2001Oblio2011ExamSoft2018Onica2024Director

What I doFour layers, from the ground up

AI is only as good as the data platform behind it, that platform is only as good as the cloud it runs on, and all of it is only as trustworthy as its security.

Surface: AI in production

  1. Layer 1

    Cloud and network foundations

    Designing the migration, networking, Kubernetes and disaster-recovery foundations that keep data and AI workloads reliable and cost-efficient, from multi-account AWS topology to the edge.

    EKS and Kubernetes, Terraform and CDK, Transit Gateway and multi-account networking, Well-Architected

  2. Layer 2

    Security by default

    Building security into every layer: identity and least-privilege access, edge protection, secrets and supply chain, and defenses for LLM applications.

    IAM and cross-account trust, Cognito and OAuth, WAF and CSP, KMS and Secrets Manager, SBOM and vulnerability scanning, Prowler

  3. Layer 3

    Modern data platforms

    Building serverless lakehouses on AWS, from ingestion and Iceberg medallion layers to governance, quality checks and serving, and moving data off legacy databases and data centers onto them.

    S3 and Iceberg, Glue and Athena, DuckDB, DMS with CDC, Databricks, RDS and Aurora

  4. Layer 4

    Applied AI

    Taking GenAI from demo to production: agents, evaluation, retrieval and document intelligence, with a hard look at cost, accuracy and safety, and fine-tuned small models where a big one is overkill.

    Bedrock, AgentCore and Strands, MCP, RAG and GraphRAG, LLM-as-judge evaluation, LoRA fine-tuning, OCR and vision-language extraction, agentic Amazon Connect

Bedrock: the cloud it all runs on ↓

Now2024–present

Practice Director, Cloud Acceleration at Protagona

A practice is its people. I lead a team of 25+ architects and engineers: I help them grow, put them on work that stretches them and back them with offerings, partners and tools. I've stayed hands-on throughout, with 40 client engagements since 2021.

  • OfferingsBuilt and now run the practice's repeatable offerings: AWS-funded GenAI assessments and accelerators for data lakes, AI document processing and Amazon Connect contact centers.
  • CredentialsLead the work that earns and keeps Protagona's AWS competencies.
  • EnablementEnable the team to grow across AWS, Google Cloud and Databricks through hands-on cohorts.
  • OperationsHelp run the company's operations with the other delivery leads, from staffing engagements and delivery health to the data and tools leadership uses to steer the business.
  • Deal to deliveryTurn client executives' goals into scoped, AWS-funded statements of work, and set the qualification rules that screen out risky deals.
  • FlagshipLead delivery of a youth career-coaching AI platform, from the client-executive relationship and architecture direction to hands-on guardrail and security work.
  • AI-native deliveryBuild the platforms the practice runs on: the operating lakehouse behind its KPIs, plus staffing, estimating, assessment, funding and competency tools and access audits; co-built the presales and account-health platforms.

SegmentsSelected results, clients anonymized

Applied AI

  • Agents in prod2026

    Shipped production agents on Bedrock AgentCore and Strands, both scheduled and tool-calling, gated by evaluations before release.

  • Rubric, not gut2026

    Chose the production model for a youth career-coaching AI by scoring candidate models against a rubric; the winner more than doubled the runner-up on grounding at nearly the same latency.

  • Agentic CX2026

    Built an agentic contact-center accelerator on Amazon Connect, with AI self-service, escalation with agent assist, Contact Lens and budget controls, deployed from a single configuration and proven in a live environment.

  • $0.0392026

    Cost per minute of footage for GenAI transcription delivered to a nonprofit film archive, at 93–98% accuracy.

  • Idea → roadmap2025

    In funded assessments, took organizations across nonprofits, public media, health, hospitality and SaaS from a GenAI idea through model evaluation to a production roadmap.

  • Price vs. accuracy2025

    Built the evaluation harness behind those assessments, scoring Bedrock and local models on public and finance benchmarks so clients saw price against accuracy before they committed.

The climbWhere the data instinct comes from

2021–24Protagona: Practice ManagerAWS Advanced Tier partner in Plano, Texas: data engineering, AI, cloud acceleration and DevOps.
  • Architect on a multi-year AWS operations and modernization program for a US digital bank: reduced its security-findings backlog, automated how patches were applied across production and non-production and moved its crypto platform's database to Amazon RDS
  • Scoped Migration Acceleration Program assessments and a network-firewall modernization for a data and analytics firm
  • Delivered AWS networking immersion training, ran the practice's EKS launch offering (standing up clusters and migrating workloads) and led Well-Architected reviews through to remediation
2018–21Onica / Rackspace: Cloud Engineer to Practice ManagerOnica was a large AWS Premier Consulting Partner and managed services provider, acquired by Rackspace Technology in 2019.
  • Built a production GemFire key-value data store on AWS
  • Led automation and instrumentation for a major US airline's migration of its distributed monolith to EKS
  • Migrated a media company's Windows/.NET workloads to AWS
2011–18ExamSoft: Senior DBA to Senior DevOps EngineerSecure exam software used by law, nursing and medical schools; acquired by Turnitin in 2020.
  • Ran 1,300+ production databases across MSSQL failover clusters
  • Moved on-prem products to AWS with CloudFormation, Ansible and Packer
1998–2011Early career: Oblio Telecom and VerizonOblio was a Dallas distributor of international prepaid calling cards that launched its own prepaid mobile service in 2005.
  • Started in 1998 as a sales engineer and moved to the US in 2001
  • At Oblio: rose from sysadmin to launch its direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform, run its contact-center infrastructure and build back-office data and reporting
  • Architected the MVNO program integrating with Sprint and Telcordia
  • At Verizon: consulting DBA and systems architect

7 AWS certifications earned between 2016 and 2026, including Solutions Architect Professional and DevOps Engineer Professional.

Off the clockEvery hobby eventually gets a repo

Guitars4
  • guitarserials.orgFree guitar serial decoder: 18 makers, 115 format rules, each traced to at least two sources.
  • Live guitar detectorPoint a phone camera at a guitar; it names the brand and model in about two seconds, CPU only.
  • Guitar CollectionCatalog that pulls specs from PDFs and maker sites with Bedrock.
  • StemForgeSelf-hosted stem separation with a multitrack mixer, chord detection and synced lyrics.
Cycling3
  • Training AppLocal-first indoor trainer app with BLE and direct ANT+ over USB. Rust, Tauri, Svelte.
  • Bike geometryMeasures frame geometry from a photo, using the standard rim size as the ruler.
  • Bike FinderAutomated bike hunting with Python and Selenium.
Dad duty1
  • Math TutorBedrock-generated practice problems and hints for a demanding 10-year-old.
Home lab and networking5
  • k3s clusterHome Kubernetes platform with a GPU worker: bare-metal load balancing, ingress, automated TLS, split-horizon DNS, encrypted secrets and Flux GitOps.
  • netwhyRust network-diagnostics CLI that tests interface, routing, DNS, TCP and TLS in order and stops at the first broken layer.
  • cartographerMaps and diffs multi-account AWS network topology (VPCs, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, peering) without sending data anywhere.
  • neolinkA GStreamer-free RTSP backend in Rust for an open-source camera proxy.
  • Fedora workstation builderAnsible role that rebuilds a workstation from scratch, CI-tested on current Fedora.
Agent tooling4
  • ship-itAgent skill that runs work through stage gates with adversarial review, so the agent doesn't grade its own work.
  • VizCharterLocal MCP server that lets agents draw architecture diagrams and charts, with 1,100+ cloud icons.
  • Breaking Barriers hackathonCompeted with Team 46 in DC, building a sandbox that observes, summarizes and scores an agentic geospatial workflow end to end.
  • greplessOffline code graph for coding agents: 33 ms median reindex on a 3.2M-line repo.

Also: trail running, sci-fi and history. English (fluent) and Spanish (native).