🌈 ~khtdr/

With 20+ years of experience building reliable software across various industries, I have spent the last few years focused on AI-driven applications. I bring decades of engineering discipline to state-of-the-art tools that change every month, building quality software that holds up as the landscape shifts. I am skilled in full-stack development and team leadership, with a focus on secure, well-architected applications.

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AI Solutions Architect Lead Engineer
Consulting through my own LLC, Upship AI, with a team of about a dozen at Machine & Folk, formed when Machine & Partners merged with another firm.

• Typescript Postgres Fabric Databricks Business Intelligence React
  Analysis Machine: self-hosted analytics agent that turns plain-language business questions into reviewable plans, SQL, and written analyses over a company's warehouse and business systems. In production at a billion-dollar company, which flew in a couple dozen employees from around the country for our hands-on training.

  • Created a generic agent framework for tools, agents, and sub-agents.
  • Worked on every part of the UI, along with evals and the permissions system.
  • Implemented a unified chat agent, playbooks pulled in by context, and cron-scheduled background jobs, so users can build models and log in to review the results.

• Typescript Postgres React
  Compliance Machine: agentic review of regulated marketing content, checking claims against versioned guidelines with clause-cited verdicts. Took it to production at the same company within 3 months.

  • Designed and implemented the system and agentic architecture, data-driven agent configuration and tooling, and an eval system.
  • Built the front-end reviewer workflows and guideline management screens.
  • Served as the technical contact with the client, alongside a PM colleague.

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AI Solutions Architect Lead Engineer

• React Typescript RAG Agents Learning Postgres
  Agentic AI-learning platform for businesses, grown from 0 to 175,000+ users in about 18 months (Q4 2024 to Q1 2026), becoming the client's primary business driver with multiple corporate deals signed.

  • Designed a learning agent that teaches people to use LLMs on the job, with personalized courses drawn from each learner's job description and realistic, contextual prompt-writing exercises.
  • Built the prototype in 3 months, then quickly built the production backend with Postgres persistence and Clerk auth so learners could save and resume sessions.
  • Built a recommendation engine that suggests courses from each learner's profile and progress.
  • Created a skill that lets non-technical product staff generate courses by describing them, publishing them as lessons and exercises.
  • Started with a 3-person team; client engineers joined to integrate it into their platform, and by the time I left it had 5 full-time engineers and a new CTO running the new business line.
• Postgres Typescript LLM RAG Vector Search
  Financial document store and semantic search with LLM answer completion.
• Typescript React Chat App Document Viewing
  Chat app for interacting with backend RAG API.

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Co-founder Lead Developer
Typescript React React Query Next.js Node.js Neo4J Postgres Redis JWT NPM
Engineering observability startup that aggregated data from GitHub, Slack, issue trackers, Datadog, and other engineering tools so teams could query across systems.

• Led application development on a three-person team, while another engineer focused on the data.
• Built the query builders, dashboards, and reporting system that exposed the aggregated data.
• Built onboarding flows, user management, multi-tenant security, and customizable interfaces.

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Senior Software Engineer Team Lead
Typescript Ruby Rails React Redux Node.js Redis Postgres Puppeteer NPM MJML Cypress RSpec

• Interviewed several hundred candidates as part of the core hiring team.
• Managed teams in publishing and analytics/reporting in Agile and Kanban processes.
• Led the transition to modern front-end tools, improving app performance and user experience.
• Designed and built custom publishing tools used to create content for millions of users.
• Integrated Metabase and Tableau into the product for analytics and reporting.

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Software Engineer UX Architect Software Architect
jQuery Javascript CoffeeScript PHP Oracle (PLSQL) React Redux Node.js OWASP JWT PHPUnit

• One of the original engineers at Kount, contributing to its growth and eventual acquisition by Equifax.
• Focused on speed and security, working on authentication, dependency injection, and theming frameworks.
• Responsible for software security training and best practice implementations.
• Developed various customer facing and internal tools.

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Adjunct Lecturer

• Taught Intro to Web Development course.
• Taught Programming Languages course.

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Lead Developer Software Architect

• Python MySQL MQ
  Developed a distributed scraping algorithm.
• Javascript jQuery PHP MySQL
  Clone of popular sell-it-yourself website.

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Full Stack Developer

• Javascript jQuery PHP Perl Python
  Worked on financial processing code and prototyped security tools.

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Full Stack Developer

• Javascript jQuery Java Oracle

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Intern Web Developer

• Javascript ASP.NET MS SQL
  Worked with many departments to develop intranet and website applications.
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