Stephen Hilton

San Francisco Bay Area
stephen@familyhilton.com
707-877-6679
SAHilton
Hilton.zone
Full Resume
stephen-hilton

Summary

Senior Customer Engineering leader (FDE/SE/CSM) with 15+ years architecting both zero-to-one data solutions for scaling high-growth startups ($0->$14M ARR in 24 months at MakeInfinite), as well as petabyte scale enterprise data solutions for Fortune 50 / FAANG. Passionate about driving the next evolution of AI products through hands-on technical evangelism, and translating capabilities into compelling demos, workshops, and content that resonate equally with executives, founders, and engineers.

Core Skills

AI Dev & Management: AI Coding Tools, AI Strategy & Design, AWS Bedrock AI, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Agent Teams, Claude Skills, MCP, RAG, Cursor AI Development, Embedding Models, Generative AI & LLMs, Prompt Engineering
Cloud Infrastructure: AWS Automated Error Mgmt, AWS Serverless Development, AWS WebDev, Azure & GCP Architecture, Cloud Architecture & Deployment, K8s & Container Mgmt
Data Engineering and Analytics: Analytics / Data Science, Data Engineering, Data Warehousing, DB Stored Procedures, ETL/ELT, Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A), Financial Reporting, Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift, MS SQLServer, Kafka, Spark, NoSQL, Observability and Telemetry, PostgreSQL, Snowflake Admin & Ownership, Teradata, Snowflake, Exadata
Customer & Account Management: CRM / SalesForce.com (use, mgmt, data), Customer Management (enterprise & start-ups), Customer Project Management, Customer Success & CSM Leadership, Customer Support & CS Leadership, Go-To-Market Strategy, SaaS Product Strategy, Sales (enterprise, start-up), Strategic Account Planning
Technical Team Leadership: College Intern Programs, Cross-Team Collaboration, Enterprise Operations, Mentoring & Employee Development, People Ops & HR Mgmt, Product Management, Solution Engineering & SE Leadership, Strategic Planning, Technical Team Leadership
Application Development: Advanced SQL Development, AI Application Development, Application Architecture, Containerization & K8s, Enterprise Architecture, Github Action DevOps & CICD, Kafka Event Streaming, Notion API, Notion API Integrations, Python, Rust, Solidity, Real-Time Systems, Stripe, Zero-to-One Startup Design
Web3 & Blockchain: Solidity, Move Development, Space and Time DB, Web3 / Decentralized Systems, Zero Knowledge (ZK) Proofs

Experience

SkillSnap.me Remote · February 2026 - Present
AI SaaS that generates bespoke, ATS-optimized resumes tailored to individual job postings in seconds.
Founder Remote · February 2026 - Present
  • Transformed a personal pain point into a monetized and self-maintaining AI SaaS product, taking SkillSnap from concept to revenue positive in under 8 weeks as an AI solo founder
  • Built an AI product atop AWS serverless stack (Bedrock, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, S3, CloudFront, Cognito) to achieve enterprise scalability and observability while maintaining low pre-launch costs
  • 2x margin by designing and implementing a multi-model AI generation pipeline using 7 Claude and AWS Bedrock LLMs and embedding models, aligning use-case to model capability to minimize operational AI spend
  • Revenue-positive in 2mo by developing and executing a go-to-market strategy including brand positioning, competitive analysis, pricing tiers, break-even financial pricing, and phased marketing
  • Managed all business operations as an solo founder, including financial planning, user observability, Stripe payment integration, pricing strategy, subscription management, and AI automated customer support
  • Led all customer acquisition strategy, marketing, SEO, and sales, including content creation, community engagement, and direct outreach to drive user adoption and retention, doubling user acquisition for each of the first 3 months of operations
  • Build zero-to-one financial planning and analysis (FP&A) function for small SaaS organization, and integrated traditional, deterministic FP&A with AI operations for continuous automated improvement and alert monitoring
Stealth Start-Up Remote · September 2025 - Present
Stealth startup building a greenfield financial marketplace for sovereign grade debt obligations.
Fractional CTO / CPO (Freelance) Remote · September 2025 - Present
  • Served as a strategic and technical advisor to the CEO, as well as architecting and AI coding the first production-grade, containerized proof-of-concept product and evolving it into a cloud-agnostic, scalable K8s architecture
  • Set technical design, architecture decisions, and platform tradeoffs to support rapid MVP / AI development and future scale
  • Used technical and executive network to recruit key hires and facilitate strategic partnerships that accelerated product development and market positioning
  • Advised leadership on fundraising strategy and partner networking to build community support for a new AI product
  • Architected an AI agentic driven ecosystem, allowing for a test-driven, auto-healing infrastructure and code-base, along with adaptive AI-bidding real-time / low-latency auction and settlement system
  • Developed enterprise architecture for low-latency, high-throughput financial transaction systems, including detailed observability, tamperproof auditing, five-9s availability, and test-based AI self-healing
  • Designed and built a horizontally scalable (sharded) PostgreSQL data platform in Rust, delivering infinitely scalable, high performance, low latency, and SQL Injection protection to high-demand operational data systems
  • Started and operated the college intern program, working directly with Computer Science and Data Science interns to provide practical examples of working with AI to students and young professionals
MakeInfinite Labs (previously Space and Time DB) Los Angeles, CA · June 2022 - Present
Web3 Data Warehouse that is AI enabled, with ZK cryptography for verifiable tamperproof queries.
Strategic Advisor (Freelance) Remote · July 2025 - Present
  • Served as a trusted strategic advisor to the CEO, working to provide input on customer, partner, and vendor engagements
  • Translated AI product vision into clear, differentiated business value for executive buyers
  • Advised on green-field GTM strategy for new AI product category to support customer success motions, and partner alignment, with high focus on sustainable and repeatable sales motions
  • Bridged customer needs to product roadmap using a combination of technical experience and business acumen
Head of Solutions / Head of GTM Remote · January 2023 - July 2025
  • Reporting to the CEO, responsible for all sales, GTM strategy, operations, tooling, and procedures
  • Owned all customer interactions, including presales, postsales, solution engineering, forward deployed engineering, customer success and customer support teams, all with a practical, hands-on leadership style
  • Engaged 900+ technical stakeholders including CTOs, data engineers, and founders across presales, post-sales, customer success retention, and ongoing support, translating complex AI data capabilities into business outcomes
  • Built and executed AI product demos, proof of concepts, L1 integrations, and implementation workshops for prospects
  • Collaborated daily with Product Management, Engineering, and Marketing to continuously improve customer experience
  • Developed a culture of continuous learning, to ensure the team remains current, confident, and credible in a new AI market
  • Position competitive and complementary technologies relative to MakeInfinite Labs' AI and Web3 products and services, to create competitive differentiation and effect maximum positive impact
  • Grew annual recurring revenue revenue (ARR) from AI product pre-launch ($0) to $3M in the first 12 months, to $14M in the first 24 months (450% YoY) by building sustainable and repeatable sales playbooks
  • Managed all revenue / financial planning, analytics, tracking, reporting, and forecasting of the core business, including quarterly presentations to the BOD
  • Directly managed all enterprise relationships, including USBank, Fidelity, SSC, FTI consulting, and 300+ SMB customers
  • Managed project delivery of first full AI Infrastructure (NL2SQL) product to enterprise customer
  • Presented at 20+ industry conferences and developer events, on AI-driven data systems, Web3 infrastructure, and ZK Cryptography, to 2000+ engineers and technical leaders
  • Collaborated with Marketing and Developer Relations to create technical content, tutorials, and community programs, establishing MakeInfinite as a trusted resource for SWEs and AI practitioners
  • Worked extremely close (daily) with all areas of Product Engineering to collaboratively ensure design and roadmap aligned with customer needs and expectations
  • Modeled and developed all ELT between Space and Time Data Warehouse and operational systems, including all CRMs, telemetrey systems, marketing datasets, and more
  • Programmed the product's first CLI (Rust), and Developed and continues to support the existing Python SDK (https://pypi.org/project/spaceandtime/)
  • Owned developer relations end-to-end, partnering with engineering on API design and directly owning SDK, while translating complex ZK and AI concepts into accessible guidance for developers of all levels
  • Authored and owned developer documentation (docs.spaceandtime.io, docs.makeinfinite.com), providing the technical knowledge base for onboarding hundreds of enterprise and mid-market developers
  • Delivered hundreds of AMAs, panel discussions, hackathon workshops, and conference presentations; served as hackathon judge and community evangelist across Web3 and data engineering ecosystems
  • Provided requirements to observability dev team and built user and product health monitors based on system telemetry
  • Delivered a production CRM using Space and Time proprietary backend integrated with Notion API / product for the front-end, enabling the organization's GTM customer master, revenue forecasting, and real-time product demo
  • Managed college interns to help them understand practical cryptographic deployments and AI infrastructure use-cases
  • Owned Snowflake SQL data warehouse (admin, operations, migration, point-of-contact) for acquired marketing tool running in parallel to Space and Time DB, including price negotiations, acquisition, and POC testing
  • Lead Forward Deployed Engineering, deploying AI products at customer sites
Chief of Staff Remote · June 2022 - January 2023
  • Early leader reporting to the CEO as Chief of Staff, helped build foundational processes for a net-new startup
  • Assisted with fundraising decks for Seed and Series A, presentations, early product demos, and technical Q&A
  • Lead vendor selection for various functions, from CRM, Ticketing, SOC2 and other compliance, etc
  • Designed initial product pricing, including both SaaS (pay-as-you-go) and enterprise fixed rate models
  • Designed GTM bonus programs for Sales, Solution Engineers and Lead Generation staff
Teradata San Diego, CA · 2010 - 2022
Data management and data science technologies for petabyte scale, Fortune 50 enterprises.
Global Director of Strategy, Analytics, and Automation Remote · 2020 - June 2022
  • Reporting to the CRO, designed and led global strategy and analytics for SalesTech (Solution Engineering and CSM)
  • Architected telemetry and analytics automation framework processing 2000+ customer accounts and $2B ARR, enabling real-time consumption insights and reducing manual reporting overhead by 60%
  • Managed and approved all ARR / revenue reporting to the Teradata board-of-directors
  • Asked to lead the transformation to a customer success strategy, focused on product fit, retention, and process scale and repeatability, which ultimately increased consumption growth 5% over baseline
  • Architected, prototyped and ultimately oversaw the creation of telemetry automated analytic framework across the entire SaaS infrastructure, which generated customer facing consumption analysis based on real-time observability systems
  • Consolidated field team feedback, customer expectations, and strategic direction into weekly technical requirements for observability and telemetry development teams, to deliver on commitments to data-driven decision making
Director of Solution Engineering / Customer Success Western U.S. / Remote · 2016 - 2020
  • Led Western U.S. territory (2018-2020) managing 3 of the 4 largest accounts and 50% of U.S. compute capacity (25% globally), representing mission-critical data infrastructure for Fortune 50 enterprises
  • Consistently delivered on the $80M+ annual sales quota with 7% YoY growth over 5 years, establishing and leading adoption of the Solution Engineering playbook for enterprise data platform sales
  • Managed hands-on technical relationships with 50+ Fortune 500 and tech leaders (Apple, Facebook, Netflix, LinkedIn, eBay, PayPal, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Kaiser Permanente, Gap, William Sonomoa, etc.), solving petabyte-scale data challenges and driving platform adoption
  • 2017, led territory focusing on start-ups and SMB across all industries, requiring a diligent understanding of operational economies of scale, prioritizing team effort to maximize revenue, knowing when and how to gently say 'no', all while ensuring to delight even the smallest customers
  • Led the creation of new Sales Engineering Director position and formalizing operational expectations of entire Sales Engineering function, including role responsibility, interviewing, hiring, etc
  • Managed and mentored team on all aspects of technical sales: discovery, executive and technical presentations, proof of concept planning and execution, implementation workshops, and customer success / upsell identification
  • Worked closely with GSI partners to ensure successful delivery of customer expectations using our technology, thus creating a win-win-win relationship
  • Specialized in data management of Digital Media and Gaming industries, working with Ubisoft, Electronic Arts (EA), EA Mobile, Jam City, Activision / Blizzard, Netfilx, Facebook, Apple, etc
  • Partnered with competitive intelligence team to develop a series of internal selling videos, to assist sellers in competing with Snowflake, Redshift, Google BigQuery, and other data warehouse technologies
Sr. Solution Engineer San Francisco Bay Area / Silicon Valley · 2010 - 2016
  • Worked directly with tech firms in the Western U.S., from FAANG tech giants to start-ups
  • Architected and deployed hybrid big data solutions using Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Presto, along side RDBMS for 20+ enterprise customers, enabling petabyte-scale analytics while reducing query latency by 10x
  • Presented technical plans and architectures to customers and prospects, from developers to CTOs
  • Assisted in OSS integrations of Hadoop, Presto, Kafka, & Spark, etc
  • Successfully executed the single largest POC in company history, driving a cross-functional team of product engineering, sales, and customer success
Lunexa Consulting San Francisco Bay Area · 2009 - 2010
Boutique consultancy servicing enterprise adoption of big data technology (acquired)
Sr. Technical Consultant San Francisco Bay Area / Silicon Valley · 2009 - 2010
  • Visa, Architected Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) supporting cross-department analytics, enabling real-time transaction analysis for 1000+ internal stakeholders
  • Yahoo!, Ad Revenue Data Consultant: consult and organize 600 metrics into KPIs trees to simplify reporting
  • Lunexa, Application Architect: architected and developed Web Analytics IP using OSS software
  • Wells Fargo, Unix Engineer: Unix scripting for online banking data stream integration
  • Real Networks, Data Engineering: Migration and integration of Rhapsody data model / ELT processing into Real Networks
  • Sr. Lead for projects at Visa, Yahoo!, Wells Fargo, RealNetworks, etc. and led Dev team on internal products
Best Buy Corp. Minneapolis, MN · 2001 - 2009
Global Fortune 100 retailer of consumer electronics
Sr. Manager, Infrastructure & Innovation Center Minneapolis, MN · 2007 - 2009
  • Led 3 development teams (30 BI engineers) delivering 90% of retail and corporate field reporting, supporting 4,000+ store locations and enabling daily decision-making for 120,000+ employees
  • Managed technical details of GSI provider Accenture, representing the interests of the business and ensuring delivery of high quality, on-time solutions
  • Created retail innovation programs improving employee technology experience, driving 18% labor efficiency gains across pilot districts and 200+ locations
  • Shifted field reporting from reporting to event-based alerting, using customizable analytic microservices
  • Set development standards for BBY analytic developers
Manager, Infrastructure & Innovation Center Minneapolis, MN · 2005 - 2007
Data Application Analyst Minneapolis, MN · 2001 - 2005

Education

Masters in Business Administration — University of Phoenix
BA in Comms, English — Minnesota State University
AWS Solution Architect Certification — AWS
Move Smart Contract Development — Udemy
Solidity Development — Udemy
Kanban Certification — Lean Kanban U.
Data Science Certification — Coursera
Agile Project Management — U. of Minnesota
Application Development — AppDev
Database Modeling and Design — Cl&ss Partners

Awards

Performance Recognition Grant X2 — MakeInfinite Labs · 2.4M SXT Tokens
Consulting Leader Excellence — Teradata · President's Trip: Hawaii
Consulting Excellence Award — Teradata · President's Trip: Paris
Chairman's Innovation Award x2 — Best Buy Corp. · Stock Options
Inspirational Leadership Award — Best Buy Corp. · Stock Options
Corp. Partner of the Year — Best Buy Corp. · High End Audio System

Presentations

Metadata Driven Development — Teradata Partners Conference
AWS Centric Architecture (Netflix) — Architect's Summit (Atlanta, Rome)
ZK Cryptography in DeFi — Smartcon
Natural Language to SQL via AI — EthDenver
AI to ZK: New Data Pipelines — Consensys
Web3 for AI — Smartcon
Resume available at https://stephen.skillsnap.me