Ronel Zapata

My most recent work has been in healthcare SaaS, where cloud-native architecture fundamentally changes what integration at scale looks like. At Cedar, I built ETL pipelines orchestrated with Apache Airflow DAGs, ingesting and transforming enterprise client data across AWS S3, Fargate, and ECS, with infrastructure provisioned end-to-end through Terraform. The SaaS model demanded integrations that were multi-tenant, configurable, and fully observable; by shifting to a manifest-based approach, we cut time-to-market from six months to four weeks per integration, while maintaining a 100% integration health score processing millions of records monthly with zero data quality incidents.

At Dental Link Exchange, I took ownership of the full AWS stack from the ground up: VPC networking and security groups through API Gateway, Lambda-based workers, SQS queues, and RDS Aurora, wired into an event-driven file processing pipeline handling thousands of dental transactions daily at 99.9% accuracy. I also built a three-model ML scoring system using LightGBM with Bayesian model comparison to validate training improvements, covering risk prediction, production forecasting, and timeline estimation, reducing manual review workload by 70%. The backend was designed around DDD with vertical slice architecture and CQRS, using X12 EDI standards for data interchange and AES-256 encryption across the infrastructure.

My origins are in oil & gas, where I spent years consulting on-site for national operators and international energy companies across Latin America, Australia, and the US, including ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Sentinel Peak Resources. I built enterprise-grade production systems on Oracle and SQL Server operating across every layer of the integration stack: official monthly production reports tied to national regulatory submissions, high-frequency daily operational data, and real-time monitoring with Surveillance of Exception to generate field alerts. On the engineering analytics side, I implemented Decline Curve Analysis for production forecasting and revenue calculation, as well as ESP optimization and production performance tools that gave operators a unified view across their assets. Each engagement brought a different organization, a different technical landscape, and a new set of constraints to solve; that constant adaptation is where I grew most as an engineer.

Outside of work, I've trained Taekwondo for over 26 years and recently earned my 5th Dan. Both engineering and martial arts have taught me the same thing: mastery is a direction, not a destination.