Dedtrick Burton
Chief Technology Officer (Founding) at VentureFract
Harvest, Alabama, United States
About Dedtrick Burton
Dedtrick Burton is Chief Technology Officer (Founding) at VentureFract. Location: Harvest, Alabama, United States.
I build engineering organizations that turn emerging AI into systems people actually depend on. Twenty-four years in, that's still the work: taking something promising and unproven, and making it operational at scale. I started as a software engineer and spent most of my career inside the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, first writing the code, then leading the people who write it. Teams of up to 22. Multi-million-dollar simulation and systems-integration programs. Over $20M in funding secured and managed. Environments where "it works on my machine" isn't a joke, it's a mission failure. What shifted was AI. As Innovation Lead on our In-Q-Tel partnership, I ran a $5M+ portfolio putting commercial AI/ML, NLP, and explainable-AI startups into production government environments. The ones that survived contact delivered 25% accuracy gains and 30% efficiency improvements. That work changed how I think about engineering leadership. The hard part was never the model. It was the architecture, the governance, and the alignment required to make it real. Today I lead the Modeling & Simulation branch at MSIC, where AI-driven predictive analytics improved our survivability assessments by roughly 20%. In parallel I'm founding CTO of VentureFract, an AI venture-intelligence startup, where I built the engineering operating model, technical governance, and DevSecOps practice for a cloud-native AWS platform: Python, .NET, PostgreSQL, RAG and embeddings pipelines, event-driven architecture. I also set our standard for how we adopt AI-assisted development. Next: a Director of Engineering role where the mandate is to build and scale the organization, not just ship the sprint. Remote-first. AI-forward. Somewhere the technology has to work because something real depends on it, whether that's defense, GovTech, critical infrastructure, or a commercial team held to that standard. What I bring: Python, AWS, AI/ML, and Modeling & Simulation, backed by 24 years of turning emerging technology into operational outcomes. If that's the org you're building, let's talk.
Skills
Additional experience
Modeling and Simulation Branch Chief
Defense Intelligence Agency
Started June 2024
Education
- Bachelor's degree, Auburn University