[email protected] github.com/carmer
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Staff/Principal-level software engineer — Full-stack, AI systems features and workflows and tooling, data platforms, apis
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Summary
Staff/Principal-level software engineer who operates as a force-multiplying sole engineer and technical lead, owning architecture, delivery, and team culture on high-stakes rewrites and greenfield builds. Deep expertise in AI buildouts, AI workflows, Agentic systems, Ruby on Rails, Python, TypeScript full-stack systems. Works directly with customers and design partners to turn ambiguous requirements into shipped systems. Track record of replacing multi-year, multi-engineer systems solo in months, cutting infrastructure spend, and correcting large-scale data-integrity issues.
Experience
Homebot.ai
Senior Software Engineer — Remote, Denver, CO · June 2025 – Present
- Replaced a product that had taken a team of 4-8 engineers roughly 2 years to build, shipping the full rewrite in 6 months as sole engineer and product manager, and cutting infrastructure and vendor spend $5,000+/month.
- Shipped title-company data surfacing that brought the company to competitive parity in market intelligence.
- Built the AI agent backend behind the company's customer chat and support products (Mastra, AWS Bedrock), including a federated GraphQL gateway across 12+ data subgraphs with per-tenant isolation enforced at the schema level.
- Delivered the first federated-GraphQL self-query tool, letting the AI support agent answer live customer questions on market and account performance against production data.
- Led its evolution to SQL self-query plus a persistence layer, so customers save AI-generated visualizations to dashboards that stay current automatically.
- Created the evaluation harness for both agents - scenario suites, scoring rubrics, and regression gates - so prompt, model, and tool changes ship on measured output quality, not opinion.
- Ran the agents across AWS Bedrock, Anthropic Claude, and OpenAI behind one interface, with per-task model routing and fallback.
- Tuned context management - retrieval scope, tool-result trimming, and conversation compaction - to hold answer quality and cost inside the context window at production traffic.
- Automated engineering workflows across 20+ repos with Claude Code and Codex - custom AI skills, plugins, and agentic workflows for code review, runbook execution, and repository documentation.
- Corrected 9.5 million misattributed records and removed a query-cost blowup from a customer-facing lookup path, while redesigning the market-intelligence data model and adding a title-company model.
- Consolidated three standalone services into one backend with the full API surface preserved, then led the retirement of the PostGraphile service that carried them.
- Tripled the PR merge rate from 2024 to 2026, and raised the size and impact of each PR, by reorganizing the team into small cross-functional pods.
- Reviewed 480+ pull requests in one year as the team's highest-bar reviewer.
- Authored 9 technical design documents and 7 operational runbooks that became the org's source of truth for a major data-platform rebuild.
CorePilot
Senior Product Engineer — Remote, Denver, CO · November 2024 – June 2025
- Worked directly with design partners as the engineering voice, turning their operations into product requirements, and built on modern Rails architecture (Hotwire Turbo, Stimulus) across AWS and Heroku.
- Took the AI quoting system from early beta to a “V2” built on multiple LLMs, primarily OpenAI.
- Created an AI workflow evaluation tool that decided whether a workflow was promotable, giving the team measurable visibility into AI output.
- Designed and shipped the inventory-management module, with configurable rules that let each customer configure and onboard its own workflows.
- Integrated aircraft-part distribution networks and marketplaces into the platform.
- Raised unit, model, request, and service test coverage, and cut CI action runtime to increase PR throughput.
Pikl.ai
Founding Engineer — Remote, Denver, CO · January 2024 – November 2024
- Guided a spin-off staffing-industry PaaS product to $3M in pre-seed funding within seven months of inception, working directly with the CPO and CEO.
- Led 4 engineers from concept to MVP, owning architecture and backend while contributing full-stack across web and mobile (Next.js, React, Vercel, GraphQL in Ruby and Python, Heroku, Redis, AWS).
- Architected a white-labeled, multi-tenant PaaS that deployed each staffing agency on its own domain, with custom-domain/DNS APIs and a fault-tolerant, event-driven scheduling service.
- Owned reliability, telemetry, error reporting, and observability tooling, and integrated multiple LLM vendor APIs for AI-driven features.
Vangst
Principal Engineer / Director of Engineering — Remote, Denver, CO · July 2022 – August 2024
- Grew the Product & Engineering team to 15 across 3+ product leaders, hiring for engineering, product, and customer-success roles.
- Led a deliberate contraction back to 3 engineers and returned to full-time individual contribution - a decision essential to the company's survival.
- Repositioned the team toward an integrated job-board and temporary-staffing services product, and drove execution of the resulting product plan.
- Advised C-level leadership on technical strategy while coding and architecting features day to day.
- Supported business development and technical research for multiple acquisition evaluations.
Vangst
Principal Engineer / Lead Backend Developer — Remote, Denver, CO · March 2020 – July 2022
- Rebuilt the product in 1.5 years as backend lead on a lean Product/Engineering team, leading to a $20M Series B (Jan 2022).
- Lifted job-application conversions 25% and monthly active users 11%, and added $20K MRR from a “Learn”/quizzes feature, on GraphQL APIs architected in Node/Apollo and Rails.
- Grew customer retention by adding job scraping to the product.
- Enabled multiple daily deliveries with a rebuilt CI/CD pipeline, and refactored the Salesforce integration (JSForce, Salesforce CDC) to cut load and processing time.
- Migrated the backend from Node to Rails on a shared database, shipping new Rails functionality incrementally while the Node backend sunset; implemented custom JWT auth strategies.
Allogy Interactive
Principal Engineer — Remote, Denver, CO · May 2018 – April 2020
- Worked directly with clinical and operations staff at a Level 1 trauma center (Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami), turning undefined clinical and business processes into an integrated ERP.
- Deployed into the customer's HIPAA-regulated environment and integrated with the Cerner EMR over HL7.
- Architected and shipped the solution (Rails, Postgres, AWS, Jenkins) with a technical focus on reducing average length of stay (ALOS).
Electric Chili Co. LLC
Co-founder — Denver, CO (concurrent, part-time) · May 2017 – May 2019
- Co-founded a digital consulting practice, pitched clients on service offerings, and scoped and delivered full-stack engagements.
GoSpotCheck
Software Engineer II — Denver, CO · May 2017 – May 2018
- Decomposed a legacy monolith into microservices, and developed and tested across Rails, React, Backbone, and Java/Scala for big-data ETL.
Turing School of Software & Design
Instructor — Denver, CO · August 2015 – May 2017
- Taught up to 30 students per cohort through 6-week iterative modules, wrote the Ruby/Rails/JavaScript curriculum, and led Agile ceremonies.
