Kevin Badinger

I run production systems and ship AI that survives a regulator. 30 years of building, deploying, and operating enterprise platforms across regulated industries. Bootstrapped a regulated SaaS platform from zero to industry standard, ran it for two decades, exited successfully. Today: writing AI governance policies, auditing AI agents in production, and building tooling for the gap between "the model is impressive in a demo" and "this thing has to work on Monday morning under load with an auditor watching."

Selected Achievements

• Built the industry-standard nurse aide credentialing platform. 1M+ certifications processed across 35 states. Clients operated on it daily for over a decade. Bootstrapped, profitable from year one, no outside funding. Zero data breaches during entire 18-year tenure.
• Lead Architect for 300+ Fortune 1000 financial institutions. Built ReconNET LCM at Trintech — bank reconciliation, fraud tracking, cash forecasting, payment lifecycle. Delivered 100x performance improvement via SQL Server / Oracle tuning. Press coverage in Finextra and Tech Monitor.
• Managed 80+ engineers across US + global teams. 50+ US engineers plus a 30+ person distributed engineering team across India, Serbia, and Brazil — separate from and additional to the 500+ person operational organization. Sustained for years in regulated production.
• Drove $200K+ annual savings via mobile exam platform (SCORE) that eliminated physical test distribution. Automated renewal reminders eliminated 90% of expiration emergencies. Automation let a small team outperform competitors with 50+ person manual operations.
• Shipping production AI daily in 2026. MCP servers, multi-LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, governance tooling. Built AI Agent Audit (~production audit daemon), ThisWeekEats (~130k LOC multi-platform SaaS, solo build with Claude-driven tooling), Guardian (self-hosted memory system).

Credentials & Recognition

• Founder & CEO — Credentia (2005–2023). Bootstrapped to a successful exit.
• US Patent #13789069 — Image encoding meaningful data into pixel values.
• HIPAA certified. SOC 2 audit experience. PCI-DSS-compliant payment integration.
• Press & recognition: Finextra (2008, 2009), Tech Monitor (2008), Entrepreneur of the Month.
• Independent third-party audit ranked Conductor in top 5–10% of custom enterprise applications by scale, complexity, and longevity. 2TB+ production database with 500M+ archived transactions.

Verticals & Tech

Verticals: Regulated SaaS · Fintech · Insurtech · Legaltech · Govtech · RegTech · Healthcare-AI. Common thread: buyers who need an audit trail.

Tech: Python · TypeScript · Next.js · Node · Flutter · iOS/Android · Postgres · AWS · GCP · Stripe · MCP · Claude / GPT / Gemini orchestration · RAG · vector search · embedded Smalltalk · COBOL integrations. 30-year regulated-systems pattern library.

Currently Shipping

• AI Agent Audit — production audit daemon for AI agent installations in regulated environments. Always-on monitoring, audit sweeps, auto-remediation, reporting.
• ThisWeekEats — multi-platform SaaS (backend, admin Next.js, mobile Flutter, worker, Stripe). ~130k LOC of active code, solo build.
• The AI Reckoning — book on why most AI projects fail in production and what that's going to cost. Forthcoming 2026.
• Full active-builds list at kevinbadinger.com/labs.

Open To

• CTO / Head of AI / VP Engineering at regulated B2B SaaS, Series A through pre-IPO. Remote-US, Hybrid Philadelphia/NYC/DC, or open to relocation.
• Senior advisory engagements where shipping is the deliverable, not the slide deck.
• Speaking on AI compliance, regulated buyers, and what 30 years of production scars teaches you about agentic systems.
• References available on request.