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Andrew Carmer

Denver, CO

[email protected] github.com/carmer

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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.

Skills

AI & Agent Systems

Mastra (AI agent framework)AWS Bedrock (LLM inference)Anthropic ClaudeOpenAILLM prompting & evaluationBraintrust (LLM observability)Custom Agentic Systems BuildoutsMulti-Agent OrchestrationRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)Agent Tool-Use DesignContext7AmplitudePlaywright MCP

AI Tools & Models

Claude CodeCursorGitHub CopilotWindsurfChatGPTOpenAI CodexGoogle GeminiLlamaGemmaGrokKimiDeepSeekMistralPerplexity

Backend & APIs

Ruby on RailsNode.jsPythonGraphQL (Apollo Federation, GraphQL Mesh, PostGraphile)HonoGoHotwire TurboStimulus.jsScalaJSForceJWT

Data & Infrastructure

PostgreSQLSnowflakeElasticsearchApache AirflowAWS (SQS, EKS/Kubernetes, S3, CloudFront, RDS, Lambda, Terraform)Cloudflare WorkersCloudflare PagesCloudflare KVCloudflare D1Cloudflare R2Cloudflare Durable ObjectsCloudflare DNSCloudflare CDNCloudflare Web AnalyticsSupabaseVercelRedisDynamoDBDockerTraefikKibanaMailHogSmartyATTOMICENMLSALTAHL7Cerner EMRHIPAASigma

Frontend

TypeScriptReact & React NativeNext.jsTailwind CSSStorybookBackbone.js

Quality, Tooling & Observability

VitestPlaywrightTurborepoZodSentryDatadogSlack APIRSpecHoneycomb

DevOps, CI/CD & Security

CircleCIGitHub ActionsJenkinsRuboCopBrakemanbundler-auditESLintPrettierruffmypyDoppler1PasswordNordVPN

Collaboration & Business Tools

FigmaLinearNotionGoogle WorkspaceAsanaSegmentMixpanelIntercomWebflowSemrushSimilarwebDescriptHeygenGranolaMintlifyMobbinSigmaCommon Room

Leadership & Management

Engineering Team LeadershipHiring & Team ScalingCulture & Process TransformationTechnical Mentorship & Code ReviewCross-functional Stakeholder CommunicationRoadmap & PrioritizationOrg Design & Team Right-SizingExecutive & C-Level AdvisingDesign Doc & RFC AuthorshipRunbook & Operational DocumentationPerformance Management1:1s & Career DevelopmentM&A Technical Due DiligencePublic Speaking & Technical Writing

Experience

June 2025 – Present

Homebot.ai — Software Engineer

Remote, Denver, CO

  • 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.

November 2024 – June 2025

CorePilot — Senior Product Engineer

Remote, Denver, CO

  • 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.

January 2024 – November 2024

Pikl.ai — Senior Founding Engineer

Remote, Denver, CO

  • 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.

July 2022 – August 2024

Vangst — Principal Engineer / Director of Engineering

Remote, Denver, CO

  • 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.

March 2020 – July 2022

Vangst — Principal Engineer / Lead Backend Developer

Remote, Denver, CO

  • 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.

May 2018 – April 2020

Allogy Interactive — Principal Engineer

Remote, Denver, CO

  • 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).

May 2017 – May 2019

Electric Chili Co. LLC — Co-founder

Denver, CO

  • Co-founded a digital consulting practice, pitching clients on service offerings and delivering full-stack development.

May 2017 – May 2018

GoSpotCheck — Software Engineer II

Denver, CO

  • Developed and tested across Rails, React, Backbone, and Java/Scala for big-data ETL, and deconstructed a legacy monolith into microservices.

August 2015 – May 2017

Turing School of Software & Design — Instructor

Denver, CO

  • Taught up to 30 students per cohort through 6-week iterative modules, developing Ruby/Rails/JavaScript curriculum and leading Agile ceremonies.

Education