Portrait of Andrew Carmer

Andrew Carmer

Denver, CO

[email protected] github.com/carmer

$ whoami
Staff/Principal-level software engineer — Full-stack, AI systems features and workflows and tooling, data platforms, apis

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Impact at a glance

0%+

support tickets cut by AI agents (Homebot.ai)

0%

fewer tokens per model call (Homebot.ai)

$0M

serviceable ARR opened (Homebot.ai)

$0M

Series B raised (Vangst)

$0M

pre-seed raised (Pikl.ai)

Summary

Software engineer and engineering lead who ships AI systems in production and owns them end to end. Leads a 6-engineer team at Homebot.ai and built the agent platform behind its customer chat and support products, where AI agents cut support tickets 70-80%. Works directly with customers and design partners to turn ambiguous requirements into shipped systems, and has replaced multi-year, multi-engineer builds solo in months.

Skills

AI & Agent Systems

  • Mastra (AI agent framework)
  • AWS Bedrock (LLM inference)
  • Anthropic Claude
  • OpenAI
  • Agentic Workflows
  • Agentic Automation
  • Agentic Data Retrieval
  • Chatbot Development
  • Multi-LLM Systems
  • Evals (AI output scoring)
  • Context Management
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Vector Search & Embeddings (pgvector, Elasticsearch)
  • MCP (Model Context Protocol)
  • AI Guardrails & PII Redaction

AI Tools & Models

  • Claude Code
  • Claude/AI Skills
  • Claude/AI Plugins
  • OpenAI Codex
  • Cursor
  • GitHub Copilot

Backend & APIs

  • Ruby on Rails
  • Node.js
  • Python
  • Go
  • GraphQL (Apollo Federation, GraphQL Mesh, PostGraphile)
  • Hono

Data & Infrastructure

  • PostgreSQL
  • Snowflake
  • Elasticsearch
  • pgvector
  • Redis
  • AWS (EKS, SQS, S3, CloudFront, RDS, Lambda, Terraform)
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Cloudflare (Workers, Durable Objects, D1, KV, R2, Pages)
  • Real-estate data (ATTOM, ICE, NMLS, ALTA, Smarty)
  • Healthcare data (HL7, Cerner EMR, HIPAA)

Frontend

  • TypeScript
  • React & React Native
  • Next.js
  • Tailwind CSS

Quality, Tooling & Observability

  • Vitest
  • Playwright
  • Zod
  • Sentry
  • Datadog

DevOps, CI/CD & Security

  • CircleCI
  • GitHub Actions
  • Linters & security scanners (RuboCop, Brakeman, bundler-audit, ESLint, ruff, mypy)

Leadership & Management

  • Engineering Team Leadership
  • Hiring & Team Scaling
  • Technical Mentorship & Code Review
  • Customer-Facing Delivery
  • Design-Partner Collaboration
  • Requirements Discovery & Scoping
  • Solutions Architecture

Experience

Homebot.ai

Senior Software Engineer — Remote, Denver, CO · June 2025 – Present

  • Cut support tickets 70-80% and reduced response times from months to hours by shipping proactive and reactive AI agents across support, customer success, and engineering.
  • 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.
  • Partnered directly with 3 enterprise design partners across lending, real estate, title, and insurance - Guild Mortgage, Newrez, PrimeLending, Huntington National Bank, KeyBank, and Windermere among them.
  • Opened title and insurance as new segments through customer discovery and feature development, unlocking a serviceable market of ~$10.2M MRR / $122M ARR, and partnered with the ALTA title registry.
  • 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 at the schema level.
  • Delivered the first federated-GraphQL self-query tool so the AI agent could answer live customer questions against production data, then led its evolution to SQL self-query with a persistence layer for auto-updating customer dashboards.
  • 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 with per-task routing and fallback, tuning retrieval over pgvector and Elasticsearch, tool-result trimming, and conversation compaction to hold quality and cost inside the context window.
  • Cut average tokens per model call 37% by moving workflows from tools to skills, with prompt caching and reusable generative-AI component libraries; enforced guardrails, PII redaction, and explicit database grants over what each agent can reach.
  • Automated engineering workflows across 20+ repos with Claude Code and Codex - custom AI skills, plugins, and agentic workflows for code review, runbook execution, and documentation.
  • Corrected 9.5 million misattributed records and removed a query-cost blowup from a customer-facing lookup path, redesigning the data model on a platform of 131TB active Snowflake databases and a 2.3TB Postgres store.
  • Tripled the PR merge rate from 2024 to 2026 by reorganizing the team into small cross-functional pods; reviewed 480+ pull requests and authored 9 design documents and 7 runbooks that became the org's source of truth.

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.
  • Built against design-partner systems that ranged from modern marketplaces to a 30-year-old custom ERP running on a single Windows laptop that served an entire company.
  • Took the AI quoting system from early beta to a “V2” on multiple LLMs, and built an evaluation tool that decided whether a workflow was promotable.
  • Designed and shipped the inventory-management module on modern Rails (Hotwire Turbo, Stimulus), with configurable rules letting each customer onboard its own workflows.

Pikl.ai

Founding Engineer — Remote, Denver, CO · January 2024 – November 2024

  • Guided a pre-revenue staffing-industry PaaS spin-off to $3M in pre-seed funding within seven months of inception, working directly with design partners, the CPO, and the CEO.
  • Led 4 engineers from concept to MVP, owning architecture and backend while contributing full-stack across web and mobile (Next.js, React, GraphQL in Ruby and Python, Redis, AWS).
  • Architected a white-labeled, multi-tenant PaaS that deployed each staffing agency on its own domain, with custom-domain/DNS APIs, a fault-tolerant event-driven scheduling service, and integrated LLM vendor APIs.

Vangst

Principal Engineer / Director of Engineering — Remote, Denver, CO · July 2022 – August 2024

  • Grew the Product & Engineering team to 15 across 3+ product leaders, then led a deliberate contraction back to 3 engineers and returned to full-time individual contribution - a decision essential to the company's survival.
  • Reported to the CEO and advised C-level leadership on technical strategy, while coding and architecting features day to day.
  • Repositioned the team toward an integrated job-board and staffing-services product, and supported 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%, added $20K MRR from a “Learn”/quizzes feature, and grew retention with job scraping, on GraphQL APIs architected in Node/Apollo and Rails.
  • Migrated the backend from Node to Rails on a shared database, shipping incrementally while the Node backend sunset; rebuilt CI/CD for multiple daily deliveries and refactored the Salesforce integration.

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, integrated with the Cerner EMR over HL7 (Rails, Postgres, AWS, Jenkins), targeting reduced average length of stay (ALOS).

Electric Chili Co. LLC

Co-founder — Denver, CO (concurrent, part-time) · May 2017 – May 2019

    GoSpotCheck

    Software Engineer II — Denver, CO · May 2017 – May 2018

      Turing School of Software & Design

      Instructor — Denver, CO · August 2015 – May 2017

        Skills & Experience

        Aug 2015May 2017

        Turing School of Software & DesignInstructor

        teachingleadership

        • + 30 students/cohort

        May 2017May 2018

        GoSpotCheckSoftware Engineer II

        rails

        May 2017May 2019

        Electric Chili Co. LLCCo-founder

        consulting

        May 2018Apr 2020

        Allogy InteractivePrincipal Engineer

        healthcare

        • + Level 1 trauma center ERP integrated workflows

        Mar 2020Jul 2022

        VangstPrincipal Engineer / Lead Backend Developer

        railsgraphqlinfra

        • + $20M Series B
        • + 25% conversion lift
        • + $20K MRR growth

        Jul 2022Aug 2024

        VangstPrincipal Engineer / Director of Engineering

        leadershipmanagement

        • + Team scaled to 15

        Jan 2024Nov 2024

        Pikl.aiFounding Engineer

        leadershipgraphqlinfra

        • + $3M pre-seed in 7mo
        • + 4-engineer team led

        Nov 2024Jun 2025

        CorePilotSenior Product Engineer

        railsai-agents

        • + AI quoting V2 shipped
        • + product catalogue

        Jun 2025present

        Homebot.aiSenior Software Engineer

        ai-agentsgraphqlleadershipdata-platform

        • + $5K+/mo saved from one project rewrite
        • + 9.5M records fixed
        • + 480+ PRs reviewed
        • + 3x PR throughput

        Education