Tommy Aliff

Data engineer and developer in Roanoke, VA. CS at Radford University; graduate work in data engineering. AWS and Oracle certified.

I’m Tommy Aliff, a data engineer and developer in Roanoke, Virginia.

What I do

  • Data engineering. I design and build pipelines that are reliable, reproducible, and easy to hand off: Apache Airflow, Docker, Python, and SQL across relational and NoSQL databases, and on AWS with Glue, Lambda, S3, and DynamoDB. The common thread is a pipeline that survives a retry and a README that lets someone else run it.
  • Applied AI and NLP. I bring models into real workflows and measure what they actually do. Recent work includes scoring sentiment with VADER and transformer models side by side, and generating animated imagery from live news headlines with an image-generation API.
  • Design. I have a design background that predates my programming one, and it carries into the interfaces, graphics, and charts I build.

Background

  • B.S. Computer Science (database concentration), Radford University, in progress
  • Graduate coursework in data engineering and cloud database architecture
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner · AWS Certified AI Practitioner
  • Oracle Certified Foundations Associate, Java
  • Preparing for AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate
  • Independent developer and consultant; technical consultant to a Salem, VA software company, 2025–2026 (two production applications shipped); former CS tutor at Virginia Western Community College

Get in touch: tmaliff@outlook.com · LinkedIn · GitHub