Principal Engineer — AI (contract)
May 2021Independent (contract & advisory)
MelbournePrincipal-level contract engineering, most recently owning the AI capability of an HR-tech SaaS end to end: the agentic layer of the product — an in-app copilot with tool-calling over live customer data, autonomous document-generation pipelines, and the server-side compute services underneath — while shipping across the full stack (PHP/GraphQL, React, Go gateway, edge services).
- Built an in-app AI copilot: multi-provider tool-calling agent (Anthropic + OpenAI via Vercel AI SDK) with data-query and mutation tools, an LLM-as-judge quality gate scoring every response on 8 dimensions, and SSE keep-alive for long agent streams
- Designed an autonomous report pipeline — one model plans the document, Claude Agent SDK runs write it against live data, a second agent pass compiles branded slide decks via a 90+ layout PPTX compiler with chart rasterization and LaTeX PDF output, agents running in a parallel containerized fleet
- Moved heavy analytics server-side (Bun + Hono behind a Go gateway): pure-function ports oracle-verified for numeric parity with the client engine, event-keyed Redis caching, validated at 20k+ entity scale
- AI data enrichment: ingested a ~32-table public occupational dataset, LLM-classified it into customer data structures, and built persona-driven simulation commands generating realistic test data at scale
- Shipped a standalone real-time collaborative app on Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects — WebSocket presence, optimistic updates with server reconciliation, embedded AI assistant with client-side tool execution
- Hunted down multi-user concurrent-edit data loss with a purpose-built integrity harness: truly-parallel mutation racing, event-chain fork detection, contract tests driving real client reducers against the live API
Senior Javascript Developer
May 2020 - May 2021Tokenized
MelbourneTokenized is a Bitcoin wallet for issuing, managing and trading digital tokens. I built the frontend, shipped as an Electron app. The hard part: keys never leave the user's machine, so all transaction and contract signing happens locally — which meant getting key management and security right in the UI layer.
Senior Javascript Developer
Mar 2018 - Jan 2020Blockbid
MelbourneBlockbid is an Australian crypto currency exchange. I started off on the frontend but eventually became tech lead and worked on every moving piece of the exchange. I really enjoyed working with liquidity providers and connecting their platforms to help us achieve liquid markets.
- React, Apollo, Styled Components
- Node.js / Rails
- Docker / Heroku / GCP
- Used Figma for design and UX work
- Optimizing markets with tens of millions of rows using SQL.
Developer
Jan 2016 - Jan 2018Listium
Built a large React/Redux application that runs everywhere — web, iOS and Android — as a PWA wrapped in a thin React Native shell. One codebase, every platform.
- Worked with Postgres, Redis and Dynamodb for storage.
- Hosted on a mixture of Heroku Apps and EC2 servers.
- Caching by Fastly and Cloudflare
- Hybrid app supported on all platforms
Developer
Apr 2014 - Jan 2016Electronic Frontier Foundation
Hired to take EFF's campaigning to the next level by building an action centre in Ruby on Rails. The action centre is built around some large open source tools that lower the barrier to entry when contacting congress.
- Developed new tools for contacting congress
- Brainstormed campaign ideas to raise maximum awareness about issues
- Lots of social networking integration
CTO
Mar 2013 - Jan 2015Earbits
Started off as a front end developer but took on the role of CTO in early 2013. The application frontend is built with Javascript and organized as a single page application that talks to a collection of Rails web servers which are connected to MongoDB.
- Managed a small team of developers and designers
- Built the entire frontend application with Backbone.js
- Transferred all of the infrastructure from Heroku to AWS
Developer
Jun 2013 - Jan 2016Taskforce.is
Worked on many politically charged campaigns against mass surveillance. Not only technically challenging work but also a lot of networking and getting my hands dirty with politics. Our biggest campaign was "The Day We Fight Back."
- Generated 37,000,000 banner views
- 100,000 phone calls to congress
- 500,000 emails
- 250,000 signatures
Founder
Jan 2011 - Jan 2014BackboneTutorials.com
I write tutorials and blog post regarding the popular Javascript framework Backbone.js. The tutorials cover a range of topics regarding front end development aimed at beginners, experts and anyone in between.
- Over two million unique visitors a year
- 25,000+ ebook downloads
- 300,000+ Youtube views
Front-end Developer
Jan 2011 - Jun 2012Ephox
Ephox is a worldwide company who is heavily involved with the development of TinyMce and enterprise editors. My primary role included building front-end widgets and applications. Worked on a major product using Backbone.js as a base. Heavily involved in UI/UX design and wire-framing. Also spend a lot of time designing API specifications and documentation.