Sam Kass
Zürich Region, Switzerland (C Permit) · samkass@samkass.com · LinkedIn
Professional Summary
Innovative software and systems development leader and practitioner with over 30 years of experience in building scalable, fault-tolerant systems. Proven track record of leading cross-functional teams and delivering high-impact projects. Experience in data management, AI, machine learning, and architectural governance. Seeking to leverage my leadership and engineering skills to develop next-generation products with a great team.
Experience
Head of Quality (R&D Lab)
Avaloq · May 2026 - Present
I have recently taken on the challenge of planning and implementing software quality strategies for a new generation of exciting products in an increasingly fast-paced industry. Stay tuned!
Senior Vice President
Roles Held at Citi
- Data Systems Delivery Lead for the Private Bank demographics data team (20+ people), transitioning the Private Bank client database to a modern, scalable architecture with containerized APIs.
- Platform Engineering Lead for Citi Private Bank, managing the core messaging and distributed caching system, and overseeing Safety and Soundness products and methodologies.
- Data Architect (current) for Citi Wealth strategic data systems transformation, reviewing data projects for alignment with Citi Wealth standards, governance, and portfolio strategy.
- Faculty member (current) of Citi’s highest “Engineering Excellence” E4 program, mentoring the next generation of technologists.
Key Achievements
- Hired and led near-shore team delivering new cross-border Demographics service which delivered secure data orders of magnitude faster using a Graph database. Hired team, architected solution, set up CI/CD plan, reviewed code, defined stories, and performed agile ceremonies. (Patent pending.)
- Led team which brought a global real-time message bus (Kafka) to Citi for fast intra-day data transfer. Negotiated with vendor alongside acquisition team, architected solution, reviewed code, and resolved global security review issues.
- As lead Architect for Citi Private Bank during its transition to Wealth, established Architecture Review Board, and have remained a Data Systems Architect in the new organization, improving Citi’s data systems quality, reliability, and scale.
- Mentored senior engineers, evaluated projects, and spoke at sessions as faculty for the Engineering Excellence “E4” technology program to show our best technologists how they can have firm-wide impact outside their immediate team.
Founder/Chief Engineer
Roles Held
- Founder/Chief Engineer (current) of small business for the purpose of commercializing LLM and GPT for mobile and web consumer use, focusing on the expat/immigrant market.
Key Achievements
- Founded company in 2024 to bring AI/LLM to help people’s personal lives, initially focusing on the expat/immigrant communities.
- Delivered iOS app which uses a mobile camera to scan postal mail, read it in any of 30 languages, and give a concise summary in 50+ languages. (Patent pending.)
- Built Google Cloud Run-based back-end on Node.js which implements model decisions, prompting, guardrails, and monitoring.
- Implemented streamlined CI/CD pipeline with automated testing to enable me to scale as a startup.
Vice President
Roles Held
- Delivery Lead for Negative News Screening (NNS) and Client Risk Scoring (CRS) initiatives in the Chief Compliance and Risk Organization (CCRO), integrating machine learning and natural language processing.
- Tech Lead for Digital Private Banking Americas (New York), leading agile transformation and improving deployment systems while building client-facing offerings for UHNW clients.
Key Achievements
- Redefined client risk evaluation with new web application which brings statistical modeling to user-friendly data acquisition, enabling fast and accurate risk evaluation.
- Led effort to apply big data analysis and AI to more than double Negative News Screening staff productivity; worked with near-shore AI vendors to process news articles and evaluate potential risk.
- Increased release cadence from monthly weekend releases to weekly Thursday releases through TDD, CI/CD automation, and service architecture.
Vice President
Roles Held
- Client Portal and Publishing Team Co-Lead for Institutional Portal Team tasked with modernizing the web infrastructure for secure and reliable information dissemination.
- Developer for firmwide resilience, publishing, indexing, and alerting solutions.
Key Achievements
- Designed a distributed document system for storage, search, and retrieval for high-volume trade idea publishing.
- Developed robust auto-failover system to ensure fast once-and-only-once client publications in event of data center failure.
- Co-Led the Institutional Portal Team, Goldman Sachs’ client-facing portal for research, trade ideas, and news.
Senior Staff Software Engineer/Principal Investigator
Key Achievements
- Designed and implemented new geospatial information visualization system for improved mapping and situational awareness.
- Proposed iterative R&D contractual structure which was adopted by US Army Research Lab for subsequent research.
- Led and personally developed results for research into usage of touchscreen interfaces in improved battlefield collaboration.
- Awarded General Dynamics’ “Scientific and Technical Society Award for Technical Excellence.”
Senior Software Engineer/Development Manager
Key Achievements
- Scaled custom manufacturing/design applications by two orders of magnitude, from startup to large-scale rollout
- Automated several manufacturing software systems to transform manual steps into distributed event-driven compute grid, enabling orders of magnitude of scale.
- Led rewrite of client-facing 3D internet plugin to dramatically simplify the product, bringing it to less-trained General Practitioners and multiplying the addressable market.
Senior Developer/Vice President of Engineering
Key Achievements
- Developed methods to correlate page segments for a US Government research program investigating how to scan the world’s newspapers for key information.
- Created optical character recognition systems with custom feature detection and composition capabilities to improve document web delivery.
- Implemented image security functionality for extremely high-resolution imagery using off-the-shelf computers (Used by US Post Office.)
Skills
- Spoken Languages
- English (native), German (intermediate: B2 certified, learning C1)
- Adaptability
- Can rapidly adapt to new environments, designs, and situations
- Leadership
- Led domestic and offshore software teams to successfully inspire teams to deliver quality products that make clients happy
- Agile Methodologies
- Experienced in applying agile techniques to reduce ambiguity, improve prioritization, and increase team communication
- Software Development Practices
- Expertise in software and system design patterns, software quality, database design, CI/CD/DevSecOps practices, and containerization/cloud computing
- Programming Languages
- Java, Scala, C, C++, Python, Swift, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL
- Platforms
- Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS
- Communication
- Clear and effective in both written and verbal communication
Education
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Math/Computer Science major, 3 years, no degree
Other
- Robotics enthusiast and hardware tinkerer
- Certificated Private Pilot
- Hailed as “Internet Pioneer” on Big Bang Theory for creation of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock
- Co-inventor of patents
- #6,976,627 (with continuations #7,306,152, #7,611,058)
- #8,260,591
- #12,277,243 (with continuation #12,443,740)
- #12,341,884 (with continuation #12,445,281)
References available upon request.
This version was updated 27-Sep-2026.
The latest version is online at https://www.samkass.com/resume/.