For Recruiters
Josh Zirena
AI Platforms & Backend Engineering
AI Tech Lead in Miami with nine years of engineering experience across financial services and healthcare. Full stack TypeScript, Node, Postgres, and AWS, with the last few years on AI in production: evaluation, MCP and LLM gateways, and grounded assistants. Led teams of 3 and 6. Below is the short version, plus a downloadable résumé.
Staff · Senior · Tech Lead opportunities
Remote US or South Florida
Selected experience & project
Eli Lilly · AI Tech Lead, contract via Coforge (2025 to present)
Work mainly on the application service behind the internal AI platform, which registers MCP servers, holds their configuration, handles auth, and routes their traffic through the LLM gateway (Bifrost), so every team's tools go through one governed path. Technical point of contact for integrating teams; own the application’s AWS infrastructure in Terraform.
ICF · Tech Lead, 6 engineers (2022 to 2025)
Built the daily evaluation pipeline for the AI assistant on HIV.gov (reference dataset, LLM judge, retrieval evaluation, Langfuse, Lambda), turning manual spot checks into a daily signal. Cut turnaround for a set of CMS iQIES reports from about two hours to under a minute with SQS events, implementing the upstream publishing integration with the owning team’s review.
Finleap Connect · Software Engineer (2018 to 2020)
Open banking APIs connecting third-party apps to bank accounts across Europe, as Node and TypeScript microservices. First lead role: three engineers in Slovakia.
NestMind · personal project
A natural-language feeding tracker that answers questions with averages and charts. The model interprets the request; the database calculates the results. Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and tool use.
Core skills
AI / LLM
Backend
Cloud & Ops
Education
Florida International University
Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology · Minor in Business Entrepreneurship
Prefer to ask questions directly? Try the AI assistant. It answers from this same material.