Willard Hucks

Principal Engineer · Enterprise Systems Engineering
McMinnville, Oregon
127.0.0.1@willardhucks.com
github.com/trydydd

Summary

Principal engineer with 14 years across infrastructure, DevOps, and platform architecture, now leading applied AI at enterprise scale: local LLM inference (vLLM), agentic and MCP-based systems, governed RAG, and AI cost optimization. Sets direction for model selection, evaluation, and responsible AI consumption while staying hands-on; track record of architecting provider-agnostic platforms and multiplying the teams around them.

Highlights

Experience

Principal Engineer, Enterprise Systems Engineering

Nike, Inc. • Beaverton, OR
Nov 2021 – Present
  • Set enterprise direction for applied AI practices: model selection, retrieval strategy, evaluation and experimentation, MLOps, and responsible AI and model governance for production use.
  • Architected a schema-as-guardrails platform that lets citizen developers generate code to company specification safely, enforcing secure tool and data access through approved containers, platforms, and reusable patterns rather than one-off solutions.
  • Designed MCP-based developer tooling (a symbol-index server) that reduced code analysis costs by ~70% by feeding models precise, governed context instead of bulk source.
  • Maintained and operated internally-hosted LLM inference infrastructure (vLLM) at enterprise scale, serving internal chat and code-generation workloads.
  • Built the framework for enterprise Microsoft Copilot adoption, including Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio.
  • Multiplied teams through architecture reviews, reusable patterns, and mentorship across engineering organizations.

Senior Engineering Manager

Nike, Inc. • Beaverton, OR
Mar 2018 – Nov 2021
  • Led the Release Engineering Core team (6 developers, systems engineers, and architects) and its Agile process; owned the global retail release platform.
  • Spearheaded quality efforts for high-demand ("high-heat") sneaker releases; founded an internal engineer training initiative to grow team capability.

Lead DevOps Engineer

Nike, Inc. • Beaverton, OR
Apr 2017 – Mar 2018
  • Architected a containerized, cloud-provider-agnostic global release management platform (Azure, AWS, and datacenter deployments) and handed it off cleanly to the owning team.
  • Designed a global package distribution system that cut deployment time from 9 days to 1 hour, removing an infrastructure bottleneck and raising release velocity.

DevOps Engineer

Nike, Inc. • Beaverton, OR
Aug 2015 – Apr 2017
  • Designed a global retail testing methodology (Ansible + Nutanix) that reduced lab creation from 1 week to 1 hour and release testing from two weeks to under one business day.
  • Used infrastructure-as-code to guarantee test-environment integrity; helped other teams automate daily work with Ansible and Python.

Service Virtualization Engineer

Nike, Inc. • Beaverton, OR
Jan 2015 – Aug 2015
  • Built company-wide CA Service Virtualization training and processes, eliminating ~$1M/month in infrastructure spend.

Systems Administrator

Performance Health Technology • Salem, OR
Mar 2014 – Jan 2015
  • Maintained the company datacenter (Nutanix Acropolis, Meraki networking, Nagios) and mentored junior administrators and developers.

Helpdesk Manager

Allegheny Technologies Incorporated • Albany, OR
Oct 2012 – Mar 2014
  • Supported 2,000+ end users across 5 remote sites; built and deployed systems; mentored technicians and interns.

Armory Chief

United States Marine Corps • Jacksonville, NC
Jan 2009 – Oct 2012
  • Accountable for $19M in weaponry and electronics; developed and delivered training to 40,000+ Marines; mentored 15 junior Marines into leadership roles.

Projects

Synaptic Drift: governed context retrieval for LLM agents

open source · in active development

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system serving verifiable, governed context to agents over MCP with schema-enforced tool contracts; ~80% token reduction on documentation/context retrieval in testing to date.

Validated by end-to-end task success: building working functionality against live, unseen library docs using a 9B model, so retrieval quality couldn't be masked by model capability. Sub-21ms P95; cryptographic content verification and lifecycle governance.

github.com/trydydd/synaptic-drift

Vamp: schema-as-guardrails platform for citizen developers

personal · in active development

Lets citizen developers write and ship code to company specification safely, enforcing secure tool and data access through schema-defined guardrails instead of manual review.

Community

Oak Swale Acres

Cofounder · 2018 – Present

Family farm investing in community food security; raise livestock and donate 300–400 lbs of meat annually to local food pantries and individuals in need.

instagram.com/oakswaleacres

Slime Mold Grappling Club

Founder · 2023 – Present

Publish free, structured submission-grappling curriculum and coaching resources; donate equipment and consultation to clubs that don't charge dues.

slimemoldgrappling.com

Skills

Applied AI

Large language models (LLMs) Agentic and multi-agent systems Model Context Protocol (MCP) Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) LLM inference serving (vLLM) Model evaluation & experimentation Prompt & guardrail design Cost optimization & inference efficiency Responsible AI & model governance MLOps Model pretraining

Architecture & Leadership

Enterprise AI architecture Platform architecture Build-vs-buy analysis Technical direction & standards Mentorship Cross-functional collaboration Risk management Agile

Platforms & Infra

Azure AWS Docker Kubernetes Datacenter Nutanix Ansible Jenkins Git/BitBucket CI/CD Infrastructure-as-Code

Languages

Python Bash PowerShell

Education & Honors

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