Harpreet Singh Siddhu — Cloud Architect & Lead Engineer

About Me

Hands-on cloud architect and lead software engineer with more than 18 years building and modernizing mission-critical systems for insurance and financial services.

My work centers on serverless architecture, cloud cost-engineering, and bringing generative AI into regulated production environments. I am an AWS Community Builder, 5× AWS-certified, and the author of an IEEE-accepted research paper on compliance-aware GenAI for life-insurance document synthesis.

I speak internationally — GraphQLConf 2026, TMMi America TestFormation 2026, and AWS Summit New York 2026 — and serve as a judge across MLH, BPA National Leadership Conference, the Business Intelligence Group, and IEEE technical program committees.

Outside of engineering, I run Cloud With Harry (50+ educational videos) and publish on Medium and the AWS Builder Center.

5× AWS Certified

IEEE Author

Conf. Speaker

4K+ LinkedIn

In the Community

Sharing knowledge through conference talks and technical sessions on AWS, serverless, and GenAI.

Jun 2026Dev Chat · DEV202

Build Policy-Controlled Multi-Agent Workflows on AWS

AWS Summit New York · Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, New York, NY

A real insurance-claims workflow built on three AWS services — deterministic orchestration with reasoning agents at the leaves, policy enforced by Cedar. Shows how to let AI agents make decisions without handing them unchecked control.

Summit agenda

aws
agentcore
cedar
multi-agent
serverless

May 2026Session

When GraphQL Gets Expensive: Performance & Cost Patterns in Production Serverless Architectures

GraphQLConf 2026 · Fremont, California

GraphQL on serverless infrastructure can quietly run up cost and latency at scale. Covers N+1 resolver optimization, DataLoader batching, query-complexity scoring, and cost attribution — with measurable data and a runnable demo. Co-presented with Shravanth Gowda Venkatesh.

Speaker page Demo repo

graphql
aws
serverless
cost-optimization
performance

Mar 2026Session

The AI Testing Paradox: Three Strategies for Validating AI Test Agents

TMMi America — TestFormation 2026 · Virtual

Your AI writes the tests, your tests check the code — but who checks the AI? Three concrete strategies for hardening LLM-driven test pipelines, with a companion demo.

Recording Speaker page Demo repo

ai-testing
genai
software-quality
tmmi

Key Achievements

Measurable outcomes across cloud modernization, cost engineering, AI research, and community impact.

$100KHackathon WinAWS Road to re:Invent 2025 Champion

79%Cost BenchmarkLambda Durable Functions vs Step Functions — reproducible open-source cost study

$240K+Cost SavingsCumulative savings from in-house vendor replacement since 2018

80%GenAI ResearchIEEE-published compliance-aware GenAI architecture for life insurance (2026)

10+Legacy → AWSTech-led rearchitecture of Mule-based annuity STP — 10+ downstream integrations rebuilt on AWS, enabling Firelight (Hexure) firm-wide digital rollout

20+Technical ArticlesLambda, serverless, GenAI, and cloud cost optimization — published on Medium, DZone, LinkedIn, and IEEE

18+Yrs ExperienceInsurance & financial services

5×AWS CertifiedCloudOps · Developer · SA · Practitioner

Nov 2025Featured

Amazon Web Services

AWS Road to re:Invent Hackathon Champion — Navy Blue Team

Won the inaugural $100K AWS Road to re:Invent 2025 hackathon with the Navy Blue Team, building ORIK.dev — announced from the re:Invent 2025 stage. Teams built projects on a bus traveling from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

Full story ORIK.dev

2024Featured

Amazon Web Services

AWS Community Builder

Selected for the AWS Community Builders program — recognizing technical content creation, open-source contributions, and community impact in serverless and cloud modernization.

Builder profile

Leadership & Architecture

Deep expertise across the dimensions that define senior engineering leadership in regulated cloud environments.

Engineering Mentorship & Team Leadership

Building high-performing teams through technical mentorship, architecture governance, and structured knowledge transfer.

Led a team of 6 offshore engineers at DXC Technologies supporting Allstate life insurance product development.
Mentored engineers across Penn Mutual modernization programs; created reusable architecture blueprints for cross-team adoption.
Served as primary technical SME on complex insurance platform initiatives spanning multiple delivery teams.

Leadership
Mentorship
Governance

Compliance & Security Architecture

Designing zero-trust, regulation-first architectures for life insurance and financial services environments.

Architected HIPAA, GLBA, and NAIC compliant solutions using AWS IAM, KMS, CloudTrail, and WAF.
Designed zero-trust security postures for regulated systems handling sensitive policyholder PII.
Applied Cedar and Amazon Verified Permissions for policy-controlled multi-agent AI workflows — presented at AWS Summit NY 2026.

HIPAA
GLBA
Zero Trust
Cedar

Cloud Cost Engineering

Delivering measurable financial impact through serverless-first design and strategic modernization programs.

Optimized Lambda costs on claims platform — memory right-sizing, SQS long-poll tuning, SnapStart, and Init duration fixes; published findings as open-source articles.
Architected in-house replacement for legacy vendor platform (2018); system in production since, delivering $240K+ in cumulative cost savings.
Drove cost reductions across 5+ mission-critical migrations — outcomes presented to executive leadership.

FinOps
Serverless
Cost Optimization

Generative AI Architecture

Building production-grade GenAI systems that operate within the compliance boundaries of regulated industries.

Authored IEEE-accepted research on compliance-aware GenAI reference architecture for life insurance document synthesis.
Pioneered multi-agent orchestration on Amazon Bedrock with Cedar policy controls for enterprise insurance workflows.
Evaluated 4 production LLMs across 186 test cases — achieved 80% reduction in unsupported claim generation.

Bedrock
RAG
Multi-Agent
IEEE

Open Source & Community Impact

Contributing to the AWS ecosystem through open-source tools, technical writing, and active community leadership.

AWS Community Builder — 12+ published articles on Medium and the AWS Builder Center, 50+ educational YouTube videos.
Built KiroForge, an open-source VS Code extension for AWS Kiro with steering packs, validation hooks, and MCP server.
Won the $100K AWS Road to re:Invent 2025 hackathon building ORIK.dev — announced from the re:Invent main stage.

AWS Community Builder
Open Source
Content Creation

Serverless & Modernization Patterns

End-to-end ownership of complex cloud modernization programs from architecture design through production cutover.

Led end-to-end migration of 5+ mission-critical applications from on-premises to AWS, owning architecture through go-live.
Architected event-driven patterns using Lambda, EventBridge, Step Functions, AppSync, and DynamoDB at production scale.
Speaking at GraphQLConf 2026 on N+1 optimization and cost attribution in production serverless GraphQL architectures.

Serverless
Migration
GraphQL
Event-Driven

Technical Expertise

AWS Cloud Services

Compute

Lambda

EC2

ECS

Step Functions

Networking & Messaging

API Gateway

AppSync

CloudFront

Route 53

Amplify

SNS

SQS

EventBridge

Storage & Data

DynamoDB

RDS

OpenSearch

Glue / Athena

Security & Identity

IAM / KMS

WAF

Secrets Mgr

Cognito

Cedar / AVP

Observability

CloudWatch

Full Stack Development

Java

Python

TypeScript

JavaScript

Node.js

Spring Boot

GraphQL

React

Next.js

Tailwind CSS

Infrastructure & DevOps

Terraform

Docker

CDK

SAM

CodePipeline

GitHub Actions

Git

Linux

JIRA

AWS SSM

AI / ML

Amazon Bedrock

AgentCore

RAG / LLM

Professional Experience

Penn Mutual Life Insurance

Lead Software / Cloud Engineer

Horsham, PA · May 2013 – Present

Current

Lead solution architecture for modernization initiatives across insurance platforms, designing AWS-based solutions that improved resilience, reduced cost, and aligned with compliance requirements.
Led end-to-end migration of 5+ mission-critical applications from on-premises to AWS, owning architecture, design reviews, implementation planning, and production readiness.
Independently built GenAI side projects on Amazon Bedrock — a domain-specific RAG knowledge assistant and a personalized advisor dashboard — integrating OpenSearch vector search, LangChain, and Strands SDK.
Drove large-scale modernization delivering up to 80% cost reduction while improving reliability, agility, and security posture.
Mentored engineers and created reusable architecture patterns and blueprints for best-practice adoption across teams.

Key Architecture Engagements

Claims Modernization

Serverless · ECS Fargate · Docker · Cassandra · Glue · CloudTrail · IAM · KMS

Contributed Lambda performance and cost optimizations — memory right-sizing across environments, SQS long-poll tuning, SnapStart cold-start config, and Lambda Init duration fixes.
Owned end-to-end downstream integration: built Glue + S3 ETL pipelines and mainframe jobs for tax, disbursement, accounting, and analytics across multilife and annuity products.
Extended claims platform to support fixed, indexed, UL, VUL, and variable annuity products with living benefit and joint annuitant options.
Designed HIPAA, GLBA, and NAIC compliant architectures using IAM, KMS, and CloudTrail.

Annuity Order Entry Modernization

EC2 · Transfer Family · S3 · Lambda · SQS · RDS · Spring Boot

Served as technical lead to rearchitect a legacy Mule/Java straight-through processing (STP) platform into a secure AWS cloud-native solution — enabling financial professionals to digitally submit annuity applications.
Rebuilt 10+ downstream system integrations on AWS, directly enabling Firelight (Hexure) as the firm-wide digital annuity application platform.
Reduced annuity application processing time by 70%, accelerating the submission-to-approval cycle and improving financial professional experience across product lines.
Designed secure SFTP ingestion pipeline via AWS Transfer Family with S3-backed staging, SQS-driven async processing, and RDS persistence — delivering compliant, audit-ready data flows end to end.

Pilotfish Vendor Replacement

Java · Spring Boot · EC2 · REST APIs · DTCC/ACORD · AWS Migration Hub

Independently architected and delivered a full in-house replacement of Pilotfish — a commercial data transformation platform — in under 2 months, timed to cut off the next annual maintenance renewal and eliminate $30K/yr in licensing costs ($240K+ cumulative savings since 2018).
Built a Spring Boot microservice to ingest DTCC/NSCC flat-file annuity transactions and transform them to ACORD XML schema, handling complex business rules across multiple annuity and life insurance product types.
Service adopted beyond original scope — integrated with the modernized Annuity Order Entry platform and consumed by multiple downstream systems requiring DTCC-to-ACORD transformation across the enterprise.
Led migration of the on-premises deployment to AWS EC2, enabling cloud-native integration with the broader AWS modernization program.

DXC Technologies

Team Leader, Allstate Product Development

Lincoln, NE · Dec 2009 – Feb 2013

Led a team of six offshore developers supporting life insurance product development.
Served as SME and primary technical contact, improving product quality through design reviews and governance.
Built tools and delivered training that improved delivery efficiency and reduced research time.

Mahindra Satyam

Software Engineer, General Motors Vehicle Management System

India · Oct 2006 – Dec 2009

Developed technical documentation including system design artifacts, API documentation, and user manuals.
Contributed to enterprise applications using mainframe and Java technologies.

Research

IEEEApr 2026

Compliance-Aware GenAI Reference Architecture for Life Insurance Document Synthesis

ICAISET 2026 — accepted for publication in conference proceedings

Proposes a compliance-aware reference architecture combining RAG, automated validation, and human-in-the-loop governance for regulated document synthesis. Evaluated across 186 matched test cases and 4 production LLMs — 80% reduction in unsupported claims, 100% approval rate.

Paper record ORCID Code

Open Source Projects

active

AWS Lambda Durable Functions vs Step Functions — Cost Benchmark

Reproducible SAM benchmark running 1,000 real ETL workflows through both services with a shared human-in-the-loop approval layer. 79% cost reduction with CloudWatch data. Companion to the DZone article.

Python
AWS Lambda
Step Functions
SAM
DynamoDB
SNS

active

Compliance-Aware GenAI for Insurance — Evaluation Framework

Open-source evaluation harness behind the IEEE paper. Baseline vs compliance-aware pipeline across 186 matched test cases and 4 production LLMs — 80% reduction in unsupported claims.

Python
RAG
LLM evaluation
Bedrock

active

GraphQL Cost & Performance Demo

Runnable AWS lab reproducing N+1, depth bombs, and over-fetching in serverless GraphQL — with real cost data. Companion to the GraphQLConf 2026 talk.

TypeScript
GraphQL
AWS AppSync
Lambda

active

KiroForge — VS Code Extension for AWS Kiro

Open-source VS Code extension for AWS's Kiro AI IDE. Enforces organizational code-quality standards through steering packs, validation hooks, and an MCP server.

TypeScript
VS Code API
AWS Kiro
MCP

active

AI Testing Paradox — Validation Strategies Demo

Companion demo to the TestFormation 2026 talk. Three runnable strategies for validating LLM-driven test pipelines.

Python
LLM
pytest

maintained

Serverless Insurance Quote System

Reference serverless insurance quoting system on AWS. Companion to the Towards AWS tutorial.

Python
Lambda
API Gateway
DynamoDB
SAM

View all on GitHub

Writing

20+ technical articles on AWS, serverless, and GenAI — published on Medium, DZone, and IEEE. Top articles have reached 25K+ views across the global AWS community.

May 2026

Building a Zero-Cost Approval Workflow With AWS Lambda Durable Functions

DZone

aws
lambda
durable-functions
cost-optimization

Apr 2026

The AI Testing Paradox: Can You Actually Trust AI-Written Tests?

Medium — @harrysiddhu

ai-testing
genai

Apr 2026

5 Replay Pitfalls in AWS Lambda Durable Functions & How to Design Around Them

Medium — Towards AWS

aws
lambda
durable-functions

Dec 2025

AWS Community Builders Program — Complete Guide for 2026 Applications

Medium — AWS in Plain English

aws
community

Jul 2025

Serverless Insurance Quote System with AWS — A Complete Tutorial

Medium — Towards AWS

aws
serverless
insurance

Aug 2025

15 Strategies To Optimize Amazon EC2 Costs Without Compromising Performance

Medium — AWS in Plain English

aws
ec2
cost-optimization

Sep 2024

5 Ways To Invalidate CloudFront Cache

Medium — @harrysiddhu

aws
cloudfront

Aug 2024

Build A Serverless Email Marketing Application Using AWS

Medium — AWS in Plain English

aws
serverless
ses

May 2024

Break into Cloud Engineering WITHOUT a Degree!

Medium — AWS in Plain English

cloud
career

May 2025

Real-Time Data Transformation with Amazon S3 Object Lambda

Medium — Towards AWS

aws
s3
lambda

Jan 2025

Deploy SpringBoot Java App on EC2 with CI/CD Automation

Medium — AWS in Plain English

aws
ec2
cicd

Aug 2023

Static Website Hosting on AWS S3 (Advanced Level)

Medium — AWS in Plain English

aws
s3
cloudfront

View all on AWS Builder Center

Community & Service

2025–present

Major League Hacking

Judge — Major League Hacking (MLH)

Evaluating developer projects at MLH-hosted digital hackathons for technical quality and real-world impact.

MLH events

2026–present

IEEE

Technical Program Committee Member — IEEE Conferences

Peer reviewing submitted research papers for IEEE-affiliated conference proceedings.

2025–present

Business Intelligence Group

Judge — Business Intelligence Group Technology Awards

Named to the judging panel for BIG's annual technology awards.

Judge profile

May 2026

Business Professionals of America (BPA)

Judge — Business Professionals of America National Leadership Conference

Served as a judge at BPA's 2026 National Leadership Conference in Nashville, Tennessee — evaluating student competitors in business and technology disciplines. Awarded Certificate of Appreciation by BPA's Director of Education and Professional Learning.

BPA

Hi, I'mHarpreet Singh Siddhu

About Me

In the Community

Build Policy-Controlled Multi-Agent Workflows on AWS

When GraphQL Gets Expensive: Performance & Cost Patterns in Production Serverless Architectures

The AI Testing Paradox: Three Strategies for Validating AI Test Agents

Key Achievements

AWS Road to re:Invent Hackathon Champion — Navy Blue Team

AWS Community Builder

Leadership & Architecture

Engineering Mentorship & Team Leadership

Compliance & Security Architecture

Cloud Cost Engineering

Generative AI Architecture

Open Source & Community Impact

Serverless & Modernization Patterns

Technical Expertise

AWS Cloud Services

Full Stack Development

Infrastructure & DevOps

AI / ML

Professional Experience

Penn Mutual Life Insurance

Key Architecture Engagements

Claims Modernization

Annuity Order Entry Modernization

Pilotfish Vendor Replacement

DXC Technologies

Mahindra Satyam

Research

Compliance-Aware GenAI Reference Architecture for Life Insurance Document Synthesis

Open Source Projects

AWS Lambda Durable Functions vs Step Functions — Cost Benchmark

Compliance-Aware GenAI for Insurance — Evaluation Framework

GraphQL Cost & Performance Demo

KiroForge — VS Code Extension for AWS Kiro

AI Testing Paradox — Validation Strategies Demo

Serverless Insurance Quote System

Writing

Building a Zero-Cost Approval Workflow With AWS Lambda Durable Functions

The AI Testing Paradox: Can You Actually Trust AI-Written Tests?

5 Replay Pitfalls in AWS Lambda Durable Functions & How to Design Around Them

AWS Community Builders Program — Complete Guide for 2026 Applications

Serverless Insurance Quote System with AWS — A Complete Tutorial

15 Strategies To Optimize Amazon EC2 Costs Without Compromising Performance

5 Ways To Invalidate CloudFront Cache

Build A Serverless Email Marketing Application Using AWS

Break into Cloud Engineering WITHOUT a Degree!

Real-Time Data Transformation with Amazon S3 Object Lambda

Deploy SpringBoot Java App on EC2 with CI/CD Automation

Static Website Hosting on AWS S3 (Advanced Level)

Community & Service

Judge — Major League Hacking (MLH)

Technical Program Committee Member — IEEE Conferences

Judge — Business Intelligence Group Technology Awards

Judge — Business Professionals of America National Leadership Conference

Certifications & Education

Certifications

AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate

HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (003)

AWS Serverless Demonstrated

AWS Knowledge: Security Champion

AWS Certified Developer – Associate

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

AWS Knowledge: Cloud Essentials

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Rajiv Gandhi Technical University

Let's Connect

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