Senior / Staff
Backend & Platform Engineer
25+ years shipping and stabilizing production services—event-driven architectures, long-lived platforms, and AI-enabled workflows under explicit human control.
- Event-driven backend services with failure-aware design (retries, idempotency, contracts)
- Stabilize & simplify complex architectures post-acquisition / in mature codebases
- AI as accelerator under human control: validate assumptions, enforce invariants, ensure operational sanity
What I Do
Technology should serve your goals, not complicate them. I focus on solutions that survive contact with reality.
Backend & Platform Systems
Building and maintaining long-lived services with clear contracts, stable APIs, and operational reliability.
Event-driven Workflows
Designing reliable workflows that handle real-world failure modes with idempotency, retries, and clear observability.
AI-enabled Services
Integrating LLM capabilities into production workflows with explicit guardrails, validation, and human control.
Selected Work
Proof of judgment: architecture decisions, tradeoffs, and real-world outcomes.
LLM Chatbot Migration: Betting on Context Windows
Migrated a DialogFlow chatbot to LLM-based architecture. Made bets on large context windows, had wins with tool calls and data management, made mistakes with vector storage, and never shipped due to acquisition.
Event-driven Systems: From Contributor to Architect
Worked within existing event-driven pipelines implementing LLM analysis handlers, then proposed and designed architecture for email integration—reviewed company-wide but never built due to acquisition.
Declarative Form Logic: Taming Complex Conditional Forms
Designed a custom attribute-based system for government forms with heavy conditional logic—single source of truth for front-end jQuery behaviors and back-end validation.
What I'm Looking For
Nampa, Idaho · Remote-first
Target Roles
Senior/Staff IC backend and platform engineering. Individual contributor, not management track.
Best Fit
Teams that value correctness, clear contracts, and operational realities over novelty-chasing.
Strengths
Rapid codebase assimilation, long-lived systems, reliability thinking, AI-augmented delivery.
Let's Talk
Interested in working together? I respond to emails within 1–2 business days.