💻 Lazouich Ford

Senior Software Engineer
Cloud Infrastructure • Python • Geospatial Data
📍 Denver, CO
📫 [email protected]

🚀 About Me

I’m a senior software engineer with a background in physics and a love for solving complex problems. I’ve spent the last few years building cloud infrastructure, wrangling geospatial data, and turning code into useful, usable systems.

Whether it’s migrating a monolith, automating AWS, or tuning a wildfire model, I like working on things that matter — and making them easier for everyone else to work with too.

🧰 Skills Snapshot

Languages & Frameworks: Python, SQL, FastAPI
Cloud & Infra: AWS, Pulumi, Boto3
Data & Geo: Pandas, Plotly, PostGIS, QGIS, Shapely
Tooling & DevOps: Docker, Git, GitHub Actions, DataDog, Jira, Auth0

🛠️ Work Experience

RedZone — Boulder, CO

Senior Software Engineer ← Data Manager ← Data Analyst
2021 – Present

🏗️ Modernized architecture: Refactored a legacy monolith into modular FastAPI microservices — clean contracts, happy teams.
☁️ Cloud wizardry: Built AWS infrastructure (SQS, Firehose, Athena, EventBridge) with Pulumi to support data pipelines.
🧪 Risk modeling: Helped evolve a wildfire risk model with Pandas and Plotly, making data-driven decisions faster and prettier.
🛰️ Geospatial everything: From QGIS to PostGIS, visualized and debugged spatial data for internal use and client delivery.
🔍 Data quality crusader: Automated cleanup of gnarly vendor datasets, saving hours of manual work. From hours to minutes.
📈 Reporting with purpose: Delivered SQL and Python powered reports to empower both business and technical teams.
🤝 Customer whisperer: Onboarded clients, clarified data contracts, and helped them get value from our systems.
🎤 Public speaker: Gave talks at PyCon 2024 — Geospatial Validations Using FastAPI and PostGIS and PyOhio 2025 - Wildfires!.

Black Python Devs – North America (Volunteer)

Executive Board Member
2024 – Present

🖥️ Infra upgrade: Co-led a sprint migrating the website from Ruby to Python — hello maintainability!
🌍 Community builder: Represented the org at conferences, built relationships, and expanded visibility.
🧾 Governance & ops: Managed budgets, policy, and internal tools to support transparent leadership.

🎓 Education

M.S., Physics — University of Washington
B.S., Physics — University of California, Irvine