R-01 / Ruby / Go / APIs / AI-assisted development / data

Senior Backend Engineer

Backend engineer experienced with Ruby, Rails, and production Go, building APIs, durable workflows, integrations, and data systems. Uses AI-assisted software development and coding agents for codebase analysis, implementation, refactoring, testing, and debugging, with hands-on review for correctness and operability.

01 / Experience

Professional experience

Oct 2024 - Present

Independent Product / Platform Engineer

Independent Development · Remote

  • Founded and launched Safety Ally in 2026, taking the complete product from an empty repository to production in two weeks; subsequently expanded it with additional features and refinements while owning product strategy, architecture, UX, engineering, AWS operations, support, and go-to-market.
  • Designed and built Job Agent and Pilot, agentic systems that use tools, persistent context, external research, decision rules, repository inspection, state tracking, outcome verification, and adaptive multi-step workflows to create career and software-development artifacts.
  • Modeled four subscription tiers against Stripe and SMS costs, then implemented hosted Checkout and Billing Portal, plan changes, signed idempotent webhooks, SMS reload purchases, entitlements, and operator reconciliation.
  • Designed trust-sensitive onboarding around privacy and delivery limits, user verification, ally consent, and Telnyx delivery-state plus STOP, START, HELP, and SAFE workflows.
  • Built a durable check-in engine with timezone-aware recurrence, transactional notification queues, database leases, retries, staged escalation, acknowledgement, and resolution workflows.
  • Deployed and operate the ARM64 AWS production stack with health-gated releases, validated deployment automation, rollback procedures, and end-to-end logging, metrics, tracing, and dashboards.
  • Build client tools, database tuning, and API integrations in Ruby, Python, Go, JavaScript, and TypeScript.
  • Built Playwright end-to-end tests for Safety Ally's critical user workflows, complementing backend and integration coverage with browser-level release validation.
Dec 2022 - Sep 2024

Lead Backend Developer / Technical Team Lead

GoX Labs · Remote

  • Migrated legacy services to AWS ECS and reduced infrastructure costs during a lean operating period.
  • Set up CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.
  • Upgraded Rails 5 to Rails 7 with zero downtime.
  • Improved SQL query performance by 25 percent through query and ORM optimization.
  • Expanded RSpec coverage with BDD/TDD practices and mentored engineers on Ruby and architecture.
Jan 2017 - Aug 2019

Custom Solutions Manager

Comcast Technology Solutions · Remote

  • Built and open-sourced the MPX SDK (cts-mpx) and CI tooling in Ruby.
  • Replaced manual Flash-console deployment work with automated ACI-driven transformations, reducing deployments from six hours to one minute and saving approximately $300,000 per year.
  • Designed 654 RSpec examples across cts-mpx and cts-mpx-aci using shared contexts and examples, custom matchers, dependency isolation, API mocking, and failure-path tests, reaching 98.65% and 96.79% coverage.
  • Built and open-sourced MPX ACI (cts-mpx-aci), a graph-aware transformation engine for migrating media configurations and dependencies between development and production environments.
  • Eliminated daily help-desk work by fixing recurring system problems and simplifying operational workflows, removing the need for dedicated daily support coverage.
Sep 2015 - Jan 2017

Technical Support Lead

Comcast Technology Solutions · Remote

  • Led the support team for high-traffic media services and owned incident response end to end.
  • Led team troubleshooting of backend issues on high-traffic services.
May 2013 - Jun 2014

Application Support IV

thePlatform for Media · Seattle, Washington

  • Served as the final technical escalation before management for complex production issues, coordinating directly with managers and senior operational leaders during outages.
  • Traced requests across microservices with Splunk and debugged API failures, timeouts, and data inconsistencies.

02 / Capabilities

Technical capabilities

AI-Assisted Engineering

AI-assisted development with production-grade verification

  • Generative AI / coding agents
  • Prompt / context engineering
  • Task decomposition / agent orchestration
  • Repo-local work plans / durable agent context
  • AI-assisted testing / debugging / code review
  • MCP servers / tool integration
  • Human-in-the-loop validation

Build

Services, APIs, and tooling

  • Ruby
  • Go
  • Python
  • JavaScript / TypeScript
  • React / Vite
  • Ruby on Rails
  • REST APIs
  • Microservices
  • Keycloak / OIDC
  • RSpec / Playwright / BDD / TDD

Data

Storage and performance

  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • Redis
  • SQL query tuning
  • ORM optimization

Ship

Cloud and delivery

  • AWS ECS / EC2 / ECR / RDS / S3 / Lambda
  • Docker
  • GitHub Actions / CircleCI / Travis CI
  • Git workflows / code review

Observe

Signals and diagnosis

  • Splunk
  • APM / distributed request tracing
  • Prometheus / OpenTelemetry / Tempo
  • Dashboards / alerting

Lead

Teams and durable practice

  • Technical team leadership
  • Architecture and code review
  • Mentoring and training

Collaboration

Cross-team and remote delivery

  • Cross-functional / remote collaboration
  • Jira / Confluence / Slack / Microsoft 365

03 / Selected projects

Tools and systems

Job Agent and Pilot

Agentic systems for career and software-development workflows, designed and built with tool use, persistent context, external research, decision rules, repository inspection, state tracking, verification, and adaptation across multiple steps.

Independent Product Portfolio

Safety Ally, Lantern, RepoPlay, and DirFlow: independently shipped products spanning safety check-ins, network intelligence, Git history, and filesystem visualization, delivered with AI-assisted workflows and hands-on ownership of verification and operations.

Comcast MPX SDK and ACI

Open-source Ruby SDK (cts-mpx) and graph-aware transformation engine (cts-mpx-aci) that automated media configuration migration between development and production.

04 / Foundation

Education & recognition

Education / 2007 - 2009

Lake Washington Technical College

Associate in Computer Networking Security and Forensics

Award / Feb 2018

Comcast Starr Award

Awarded for an automated deployment system that reduced labor costs by approximately $300,000 per year.

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