[email protected] github.com/carmer
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Staff/Principal-level software engineer — Full-stack, AI agent backends 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 agent backends, data-platform architecture, and Ruby on Rails, Python, TypeScript full-stack 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
Software Engineer — Remote, Denver, CO · June 2025 – Present
- Sole product manager and sole engineer on a complete rewrite of a real-estate partner-intelligence product, delivered in 6 months - replacing a legacy version that had originally taken a team of 4-8 engineers roughly 2 years to build; cut infrastructure and vendor costs by $5,000+/month post-release and shipped a title-company data-surfacing feature that brought the company to competitive parity in market intelligence.
- Built the AI agent backend powering the company's AI-driven customer chat and customer-support products (Mastra agent framework, AWS Bedrock inference), including a federated GraphQL gateway spanning 12+ data subgraphs with per-tenant data isolation enforced at the schema level.
- Built the first federated-GraphQL self-query tool enabling the AI support agent to answer live market and account-performance questions against production data; led its evolution to a SQL self-query approach plus a persistence layer letting customers save AI-generated visualizations to dashboards that stay current automatically.
- Redesigned the complete data model for the market-intelligence product and added a new title-company data model; corrected 9.5 million misattributed records and eliminated a query-cost blowup in a customer-facing lookup path.
- Designed, shipped, and later led the retirement of a production PostGraphile-based API service, consolidating three standalone services into a single backend while preserving the full API surface.
- First hire of the company's new CTO (June 2025); led a culture shift from an unenthusiastic and unenergized workforce to small, dynamic cross-functional pods, improving the PR merge rate 3x from 2024 to 2026 while increasing the size and impact of each PR.
- 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 reference source of truth for a major data-platform rebuild.
CorePilot
Senior Product Engineer — Remote, Denver, CO · November 2024 – June 2025
- Focused on modern Ruby on Rails architecture (Hotwire Turbo, StimulusJS) on AWS and Heroku; represented engineering in design-partner meetings to guide product decisions.
- Architected, planned, and built the inventory management module with configurable, customizable rules for companies onboarding their own workflows.
- Built integrations with aircraft-part distribution networks and marketplaces; transitioned the AI quoting system from an early beta to a "V2" built on multiple LLMs (primarily OpenAI).
- Built an AI workflow evaluation tool to determine whether an AI workflow was promotable to the current version, giving the team measurable, less opinionated visibility into AI workflow output.
- Championed unit, model, request, and service test coverage and built CI/CD enhancements that decreased action runtime and increased PR throughput.
Pikl.ai
Senior Founding Engineer — Remote, Denver, CO · January 2024 – November 2024
- Worked closely with the CPO and CEO to guide a spin-off staffing-industry PaaS product to $3M in pre-seed funding within seven months of inception.
- Led a team of 4 engineers from concept to MVP, owning architecture and backend development while contributing full-stack across web and mobile (Next.js, React, Vercel, GraphQL in Ruby and Python, Heroku, Redis, AWS).
- Architected and built a white-labeled, multi-tenant PaaS platform for temporary staffing agencies, including custom-domain/DNS APIs and a highly scalable, fault-tolerant, event-driven scheduling service.
- Set up and owned reliability and telemetry services, error reporting, and observability tooling; integrated multiple LLM vendor APIs for AI-driven features.
Vangst
Principal Engineer / Director of Engineering — Remote, Denver, CO · July 2022 – August 2024
- Wore many hats in an early-stage startup - coding day to day, planning and architecting features, and providing high-level technical guidance to C-level leadership.
- Interviewed and hired for engineering, product, and customer-success roles, growing the Product & Engineering team to 15 across 3+ product leaders, then led a deliberate contraction back to 3 full-time engineers plus himself as a full-time individual contributor - a decision essential to the company's survival.
- Led the team's repositioning toward an integrated job-board and temporary-staffing services product, coordinating and strategizing execution of the resulting product plan.
- Advised on business development and research for multiple acquisition evaluations.
Vangst
Principal Engineer / Lead Backend Developer — Remote, Denver, CO · March 2020 – July 2022
- Backend lead on a lean Product/Engineering team that redefined and rebuilt the product in 1.5 years, leading to a $20M Series B (Jan 2022).
- Architected and built GraphQL APIs in Node/Apollo and Rails; shipped features with measurable impact - a 25% increase in job-application conversions, growth in customer retention from job scraping, an 11% increase in monthly active users from community features, and $20K MRR growth from a "Learn"/quizzes feature.
- Rebuilt the CI/CD pipeline to enable multiple daily deliveries; refactored the Salesforce integration (JSForce, Salesforce CDC) to reduce load and processing time.
- Planned and built a complete backend rewrite from Node to Rails on a shared database, incrementally shipping new functionality in Rails while supporting the sunsetting Node backend; implemented custom JWT auth strategies.
Allogy Interactive
Principal Engineer — Remote, Denver, CO · May 2018 – April 2020
- Investigated and translated complex clinical and business processes into an integrated ERP solution at a Level 1 trauma center (Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami), integrating with the Cerner EMR over HL7 in a HIPAA-compliant environment.
- Architected, designed, and deployed 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 · May 2017 – May 2019
- Co-founded a digital consulting practice, pitching clients on service offerings and delivering full-stack development.
GoSpotCheck
Software Engineer II — Denver, CO · May 2017 – May 2018
- Developed and tested across Rails, React, Backbone, and Java/Scala for big-data ETL, and deconstructed a legacy monolith into microservices.
Turing School of Software & Design
Instructor — Denver, CO · August 2015 – May 2017
- Taught up to 30 students per cohort through 6-week iterative modules, developing Ruby/Rails/JavaScript curriculum and leading Agile ceremonies.
