About

About Me

Hi, I'm Shinya Tahara (shinyaz) -- a Solutions Architect in the Financial Services Industry division at Amazon Web Services Japan. I provide technical guidance to customers, primarily in the financial industry, helping them leverage AWS to build scalable and reliable systems.

Before joining AWS, I spent 10 years at Nomura Research Institute (NRI) as an Infrastructure Engineer, designing, building, and operating mission-critical large-scale systems for the retail and financial/securities industries. Drawing on deep experience across both on-premises and public cloud environments, I now help customers with cloud migration, AI/ML adoption, and modern application development. This blog is where I share technical notes and learnings from my work.

Areas of Expertise

Cloud Architecture: Scalable system design and technical guidance centered on AWS
AI/ML: Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, LLM applications, RAG architectures
Infrastructure Design & Operations: Stable operation and modernization of mission-critical systems
Container Technologies: Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker
Automation: Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines
Security: PCI-DSS compliant system design and operations

Work Experience

Amazon Web Services Japan (September 2020 -- Present)

Solutions Architect

Providing technical guidance to financial industry customers on AWS-based system architecture design. Supporting customers across a wide range of areas including cloud migration, AI/ML adoption, and modern application development.

Nomura Research Institute (April 2010 -- August 2020)

Infrastructure Engineer / Infrastructure Lead

Led infrastructure for shared-service platforms, managing projects ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of yen in scale.

On-premises to OCI Cloud Migration (2019--)
- Migrating an investment information shared-service to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
- Project scale: ~1.5B JPY / ~250 person-months / ~70 servers
- Leading infrastructure design with Ansible and Terraform automation
Real-time Market Data Distribution System Replacement (2019)
- Drove infrastructure build efficiency through automated provisioning
- Leveraged AWS for validation environments to reduce costs
Wholesale Securities Back-Office System Operations & Replacement (2017--2018)
- Managed ~500M JPY/year operations (~250 person-months) as infrastructure lead
- Promoted container technology adoption with OpenShift
PCI-DSS Compliant Payment System Design & Operations (2015--2016)
- Designed and built infrastructure meeting credit industry security standards
Convenience Store Payment System Build & Operations (2010--2014)
- Managed mission-critical systems for Japan's largest convenience store chain
- Pioneered in-house adoption of fault-tolerant database products

Education

Tokyo Institute of Technology -- M.Eng., Integrated Systems (2009)
Tokyo Institute of Technology -- B.Eng., Computer Science (2007)

Certifications

AWS Certifications

AWS Certified Solutions Architect -- Professional
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer -- Professional
AWS Certified Solutions Architect -- Associate
AWS Certified Developer -- Associate
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator -- Associate
AWS Certified Advanced Networking -- Specialty
AWS Certified Security -- Specialty
AWS Certified Machine Learning -- Specialty
AWS Certified Data Analytics -- Specialty
AWS Certified Database -- Specialty
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Other Cloud

Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
Google Cloud Certified -- Professional Cloud Architect
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2019 Certified Architect Associate

Infrastructure & Security

Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration
Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation
Registered Information Security Specialist Examination (情報処理安全確保支援士試験)
Network Specialist Examination (ネットワークスペシャリスト試験)
Database Specialist Examination (データベーススペシャリスト試験)

Other

Chartered Member of the Securities Analysts Association of Japan (CMA)

Tech Stack

Category	Technologies
Languages	Python, Go, TypeScript, Rust
Cloud	AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Containers	Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker
Automation	Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD
OS	Linux (RHEL, Ubuntu), Windows Server
Databases	Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB
Networking	L2/L3 design, load balancers, DNS
Virtualization	VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM
Frontend	Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS
AI/ML	Amazon Bedrock, PyTorch, LangChain

Speaking & Writing

AWS Summit Japan 2025 -- "Practical Generative AI Adoption and Implementation Approaches from Amazon's Use Cases" (AWS-22)
AWS Builders Online Series 2024 -- "Try Amazon Bedrock via API as a Builder — A Guide to Super Easy API Calls" (BOS-05)
AWS Innovate - AI/ML and Data Edition 2024 -- "Tips and Techniques to Boost Development Efficiency with Amazon CodeWhisperer" (T2-4)
AWS AI Week for Developers -- "Getting Started with Generative AI Using Amazon CodeWhisperer" (Beginner Track)
AWS Innovate - Data and AI/ML Edition 2023 -- "Practice No-Code Machine Learning with Amazon SageMaker Canvas" (T2-2)
AWS Summit Tokyo 2023 -- "AWS DeepRacer Workshop — Start Your Machine Learning Journey with Hands-on"
AWS Blog -- "Event Report: AWS GenAI Catapult! — Creating Customer-Centric Use Cases with Generative AI" (November 2025)
AWS Blog -- "Saison Technology's Generative AI Case Study: Reducing Support Engineer Response Time by Up to 30% with Amazon Bedrock" (July 2024, co-authored)