Robert Ellegate
Buffalo, US
robellegate@gmail.com
+1-716-909-4898

AI/ML and software engineer with 6+ years of experience building production systems across applied generative AI, LLM evaluation, privacy-preserving data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and site reliability engineering. Co-designed a patent-pending multi-agent PII anonymization system and built Yahoo's Claude Code plugin and CI ecosystem within two weeks of launch. Experienced with Python, LangGraph, Google ADK, GCP, Kubernetes, distributed evaluation pipelines, and production readiness for business-critical services.

Experience


Software Dev. Engineer - AI/ML Mail Intelligence
April 2025
 — 
May 2026
Yahoo

AI/ML and developer-infrastructure engineering for Yahoo Mail's Mail Intelligence organization: multi-agent systems for PII anonymization of training data, structured-output reliability engineering, and a first-of-its-kind Claude Code plugin/CI ecosystem.

  • Co-designed a multi-agent system for semantic anonymization of email data that strips every category of PII while preserving the linguistic structure downstream models train on, reconciling an internal PII taxonomy that diverged from LLMs' pretraining priors; reached ~0.87 recall (the priority metric for anonymization) at ~0.75 precision. Patent-pending.
  • Built Yahoo's Claude Code plugin ecosystem within two weeks of Anthropic's launch by reverse-engineering the minified cli.js to recover the Zod schemas for plugin/marketplace manifests before they were public; the resulting Screwdriver command became the de facto way to run Claude in CI across Yahoo.
  • Owned experimentation velocity for the agent work: ran a head-to-head evaluation of LangGraph vs Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK) that informed the production framework choice, and scaled the team's eval harness by multithreading ORC reads from GCS and multiprocessing HTML-to-text conversion cutting eval-run time from 4 hours to 15 minutes.
Site Reliability Engineer
November 2022
 — 
April 2025
Yahoo

Key contributor to Yahoo Mail's migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Developed Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for containerized applications, monitoring dashboards, and alerts. Led efforts to increase SMTP availability to 99.9% and ensure production readiness for critical applications.

  • Drove Yahoo Mail's migration to Google Cloud Platform (GKE), authoring Infrastructure as Code for containerized services, monitoring dashboards, and alerting migrating dozens of workloads.
  • Raised SMTP availability to 99.9% (from 97.5%).
  • Led Production Readiness Reviews for business-critical services, codifying standards adopted across 9 teams.
  • Modernized the incident-alert Slack bot and introduced Kubernetes-based dev environments; co-authored an Ansible collection for on-prem triage and remediation.
Assoc. Site Reliability Engineer
December 2020
 — 
November 2022
Yahoo

Cross-platform SRE role spanning Yahoo Search, Mail, and AdTech — building reliability tooling, automating operations, and driving incident response across some of Yahoo's highest-traffic services.

  • Owned reliability operations across Yahoo Search, Mail, and AdTech, managing ~500 incidents/quarter with consistently top-rated escalation quality.
  • Automated provisioning and configuration of shared toolbox VMs with Ansible reducing setup from days to minutes.
  • Improved monitoring signal-to-noise, cutting non-actionable alerts ~92%, by partnering with escalation teams.
Jr. Software/Systems Design Engineer - Technical Specialist
January 2019
 — 
December 2019
RIT ITS

DevOps and infrastructure development using containerization and CI/CD pipelines.

  • Containerized the university's Shibboleth Single Sign-On system, automating config validation and deployment through CI/CD pipelines.
  • Stood up proof-of-concept Netbox infrastructure enabling stakeholders to evaluate it against organizational needs.
Information Security Analyst
June 2017
 — 
July 2018
New York State ITS

Security assessments and automation for New York State's IT infrastructure, ensuring NIST 800-63 compliance.

  • Conducted a cybersecurity vulnerability assessment of prison water-treatment control systems, identifying and mitigating critical risks to life-safety infrastructure.
  • Developed Push2SharePoint (Go) and a ServiceNow reporting tool (PowerShell), automating reporting and document workflows.

Projects


Master the Code: How to Ace the Technical Assessment with AI
August 2025
 — 
August 2025

Co-led a workshop at BaddieCon 2025 (NYC) on using AI as a strategic study partner for technical interview prep.

  • Taught attendees — from bootcamp grads to experienced engineers — how to use AI prompting for resume-job description gap analysis, S.T.A.R. method for behavior interviews, and mock-interview coding problem walkthroughs generation.
  • Represented Yahoo in a sponsored session at a 1,000+ attendee conference for women of color in tech

Education


Rochester Institute of Technology
January 2015
 — 
January 2019
Bachelor of Science in Computing and Information Technology

Skills


AI/ML Engineering:
Multi-Agent Systems (LangGraph, Google ADK), LLM Evaluation Harnesses, Privacy-Preserving ML (PII Anonymization), Model Distillation, AI-Assisted Development (Claude Code, Plugin Architecture)
Software Development:
Python (Polars, PyArrow, pytest, Typer), CLI Tools, REST APIs, CI/CD Pipelines
Infrastructure & Reliability:
GCP (GKE, Vertex AI), Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, Incident Management, Production Readiness