Roman Burdakov is an engineering and technology leader with more than 18 years of experience applying data, analytics, and software systems to complex operational problems. He leads Amazon Security Lake at Amazon Web Services (AWS), with end-to-end responsibility for the service’s engineering and operations. Roman recently completed the Executive MBA program at the MIT Sloan School of Management, with a focus spanning business analytics, operations, and innovation.

As part of his MIT Sloan program, Roman worked with the U.S. Soybean Export Council on an innovation project exploring how soybean meal quality could be measured and communicated beyond crude protein alone. The work incorporated research led by MIT Professor Roberto Rigobon, including a game-based study that asked industry participants to make real trade-offs between crude protein and other dimensions of soybean meal quality—such as digestibility, solubility, processing quality, and energy—and examined how they prioritize these attributes. These findings have helped inform the continued development of the GOLD soybean meal quality benchmarking methodology, which seeks to translate multiple dimensions of quality into practical information for procurement, benchmarking, and operational decision-making.