Experience · Erick E. Shepherd

Experience

From satellite data pipelines to production LLM-to-database integrations — a decade across enterprise software, defense, and NASA research.

Aug 2021 – May 2026

Application Development Advisor

Cigna Supplemental Health Services (via Magnit Global) · Remote

Lead and core developer on the Oracle APEX applications powering a national supplemental-health-insurance underwriting pipeline, from quoting through contract generation.

Lead developer on the Field Quote Tool — the entry point of the underwriting pipeline used daily by sales, pricing, and underwriting teams — and core developer on Engage, the downstream contract-generation tool, across the full tenure.
Introduced Git and GitHub to a team with no source control, establishing the branching, code-review, and commit standards adopted across the group, with admin over 29 repositories.
Co-designed the team's first CI/CD pipeline and led the Oracle APEX deployment-workflow integration.
Designed and built MAKESQL, a domain-specific language and Python package that compiles PL/SQL objects in correct dependency order across environments — replacing an error-prone manual process — plus a companion VS Code syntax-highlighting extension.
Built a Python abstraction layer over the OracleDB environments that let Claude, via Cursor Composer, query enterprise databases through a locally-running credentialed utility — one of the team's first production AI integrations.
Authored an OCR-backed ETL pipeline using pandas and pytesseract that migrated inconsistently structured Excel pricing data — including rate tables embedded as images — into Oracle on upload.
Mapped dependencies across 15+ applications and hundreds of database objects with graphviz and networkx into architectural reference graphs delivered to leadership.
Led a four-developer squad: task delegation, code review, and technical direction.

Jul 2020 – Jun 2025

Freelance Systems Engineer

Independent · Remote

Independent contract engineering spanning embedded/IoT devices and web and data systems.

Designed and prototyped IoT security devices: embedded firmware in C and Python, custom PCB design, and sensor integration.
Delivered smaller contracts across web development, data automation, and systems integration.

Jun 2020 – May 2021

Radar Systems Engineering Intern

Northrop Grumman Mission Systems · Baltimore, MD

Systems engineering within a cleared defense environment.

Worked inside a cleared facility on large-scale defense systems-engineering processes, documentation standards, and cross-functional workflows.
Held an active DoD Secret clearance (obtained April 2020; lapsed 2021, eligible for reinstatement).

Jun 2019 – Dec 2019

Sally Ride Intern — Dark Target Aerosol Group

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center · Greenbelt, MD

Improved NASA's MODIS Dark Target aerosol-retrieval research product; two tools filed as NASA New Technology Reports.

Wrote a Python AERONET data-retrieval tool and a Python re-implementation of the IDL CONGRID interpolation routine — both filed as NASA New Technology Reports — eliminating a proprietary IDL licensing dependency from the Dark Target pipeline.
Showed that near-real-time GFS forecast fields could substitute for older GDAS re-analyses in aerosol retrieval, enabling near-real-time processing; presented at the AGU Centennial Fall Meeting in 2019.
Selected for the nationally competitive NASA Sally Ride Internship under the Science Mission Directorate.

Jun 2018 – Aug 2018

Advanced Computing in Earth Sciences (ACES) Intern

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center · Greenbelt, MD

Studied poleward aerosol transport using space-based lidar from the International Space Station.

Analyzed CATS and CALIPSO lidar backscatter and depolarization data to characterize poleward aerosol transport; presented at the GSFC summer intern poster session.
Selected for the NASA ACES program — 20 students nationally — an intensive in HPC, scientific software engineering, and Earth-science data analysis.

Aug 2017 – May 2020

Research Assistant

UMBC — Department of Physics, ACROS Group · Baltimore, MD

Atmospheric remote-sensing research on UMBC's Taki supercomputer under an NSF CyberTraining grant.

Implemented a K-Nearest-Neighbors algorithm to collocate MODIS satellite cloud observations with NOAA and NSIDC sea-ice measurements, investigating anomalous cloud-opacity discrepancies between MODIS and CALIOP.
Ran analyses on the Taki HPC cluster (SLURM, GPU, InfiniBand) with NumPy, SciPy, scikit-learn, PySpark, and mpi4py; co-authored conference presentations at the MODIS/VIIRS Science Team Meeting and the International Radiation Symposium.

Jan 2018 – May 2019

Teaching Assistant, Computational Physics

UMBC — Department of Physics · Baltimore, MD

Teaching assistant for Introduction to Computational Physics (PHYS 220).

Graded projects, held office hours, and led lectures covering Python, Monte Carlo methods, numerical linear algebra, and ODEs/PDEs.

Sep 2015 – Dec 2017

Chief Operations Officer & Co-Founder

Industrial Commons, Inc. · Hagerstown, MD

Co-founded and ran operations for a 501(c)(3) community makerspace.

Co-founded a non-profit community makerspace of roughly 20 members; ran day-to-day operations, built and operated the website, and led STEM workshops in Python, Raspberry Pi, and 3D printing and design.
Led science-demonstration outreach with a local museum, including 3D-printed educational models.