Kevin Badinger
Principal Software Engineer — AI Systems · Shipping production LLM systems
Summary
Hands-on AI systems engineer shipping production LLM applications today: multi-agent orchestration (LangGraph, MCP tool-calling), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over pgvector and hybrid vector plus full-text search, LLM eval harnesses, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop review — Python-first across FastAPI, Postgres, and multi-provider LLM stacks (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Grok). Currently operating a live rail fleet-operations platform with real-time Class I railroad integrations, an AI memory system exposing 100+ tools over MCP, and an autonomous multi-agent development loop that has driven thousands of AI-written commits across a polyglot distributed system. Earlier career: architected and ran the U.S. industry-standard nurse aide credentialing platform (1M+ certifications across 35 states) and led architecture for Fortune 1000 financial systems — deep ownership of regulated, high-stakes production systems end to end.
Experience
Principal Engineer — AI Systems
Resolvent Technologies
My production-AI engineering practice. I design, build, and operate LLM-powered systems end to end — backend, mobile, billing, infrastructure — hands-on.
Autonomous multi-agent development system (Ralph + qtown)
Ralph, an autonomous dev loop driving a local Qwen model via Ollama through plan-code-commit cycles with tool-calling; v1 produced a FastAPI/SQLAlchemy/Postgres platform (1,451 commits, 88% AI-written, 550 stories). qtown v2: a 9-service, 12-language polyglot distributed system (~101K LOC) driven by a Ralph v2 orchestrator — Kafka, gRPC/Protobuf, Postgres+pgvector, Redis, a Go order-book service, a Rust safety service with a Wasmtime WASM sandbox, a Python LLM service (LangGraph, Ollama, pgvector RAG), Apollo GraphQL federation, Elasticsearch. An R&D testbed for AI-orchestrated engineering — not a shipped product.
Guardian (AI memory & decision system)
An always-on MCP server exposing 100+ tools, a knowledge graph, and RAG over hybrid search (SQLite + sqlite-vec + FTS5), orchestrating Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok. A "Dreamer" consolidation engine derives deductive/inductive facts with lineage; human-in-the-loop fact review gates model context. Personal single-user system.
eRail TrackTrace (live production rail fleet-ops)
Real-time Union Pacific & BNSF API integrations for a real rail-fleet customer; 11GB U.S. rail-network dataset reduced 95% via SHA-256 dedup; sub-3-second routing across 10,000+ point routes; two offline-first Flutter field apps; on Digital Ocean.
Supporting work
ThisWeekEats (live AI meal-planning product, ~130K LOC on Vercel, 50 beta testers, Instacart integration code-complete); a multi-LLM adversarial evaluation panel (4 model votes, adversarial pass, confidence-weighted aggregation, human sign-off); an LLM-judged voice-fidelity scoring eval with a learn-from-edit loop; hipaa-de-id (public repo, all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers, PHI-stripping LLM proxy).
Founder & CEO
Credentia · Conductor Platform
Built the Conductor platform — one continuous build. In 2010 it went to market as Credentia, which became the industry standard for nurse aide credentialing in the United States. From the first line of code to a successful exit in 2023.
- Conductor — supported the largest nurse aide testing program in the United States; 1M+ certifications; clients operated on it daily across 35 states; still in production today.
- Bootstrapped, profitable from year one, no outside capital; scaled the company from zero to 500+ people.
- Managed 50+ US engineers plus a separate 30+ person global engineering organization across India, Serbia, and Brazil. Owned the full company P&L.
- Sub-5% annual voluntary engineering turnover across Conductor's run, even as team size flexed up and down over the years.
- Integrated multiple major payment processors under PCI-DSS-compliant controls. Full regulatory compliance: HIPAA, state nursing board, federal testing standards. Zero data breaches during entire tenure.
- Never lost a contract the entire time Conductor ran (two decades in production) — zero terminations; contracts that ended did so at natural expiry.
- Bootstrapped to a successful exit in 2023.
Lead Architect
Trintech (Enterprise Financial Software)
- Lead Architect for ReconNET LCM (Lifecycle Management) — banking reconciliation and compliance platform serving 300+ Fortune 1000 financial institutions worldwide. Multi-national deployments.
- Primary Architect of LCM Payments — browser-based account reconciliation and positive pay system on Microsoft .NET for financial institutions, with real-time fraud prevention and payment lifecycle management. Press coverage: Finextra (2008, 2009), Tech Monitor (2008).
- 100x performance improvement on reconciliation products through SQL Server and Oracle tuning.
- Development Manager for Fraud Tracking software — transaction anomaly detection and investigation workflows.
- Multi-state regulatory compliance for unclaimed property/escheatment.
- Technical sales engineering for $500 billion investment company (3-person team).
- Reversed sales win-loss ratio from 0% to 100% in one quarter through GUI redesign.
- Entrepreneur of the Month award.
Earlier: Software Engineer, DSC Communications and Texas Instruments.
Major Platforms Built
Conductor
Nurse aide credentialing platform. In production for years. 1M+ certifications across 35 states. Industry standard platform — clients operate on it daily. Multi-portal architecture. 50+ state database integrations. Bootstrapped to a successful exit.
ReconNET LCM (Trintech)
Banking compliance platform for 300+ Fortune 1000 financial institutions. Bank reconciliation. Cash forecasting. Unclaimed property management. Payment lifecycle. Multi-national deployment.
LIFE Languages
Personality assessment platform. In production for years. 7 Biblical Life Languages. Multi-national deployment. Complex grading algorithms.
SCORE
Mobile exam platform. iOS/Android native apps. $200k+ annual savings. Offline exam administration. Instant score delivery.
StarFloors
Senior living operations platform. 85% productivity gain, 53% reduction in work-order processing time. 10K+ daily / 5,000+ monthly transactions. Deployed to largest US operators. 9+ years operational.
AI Projects
All projects built using Claude Code as primary development environment.
AI Agent Audit
Production audit daemon for OpenClaw AI agent installations. 7 always-on monitors, 20 periodic audit sweeps, auto-remediation, HTML reporting. Configuration assessment, credential exposure scanning, marketplace/skill supply chain checks. Built in response to 135K+ exposed instances and Gartner's "insecure by default" assessment.
HIPAA De-Identification Pipeline
Open-source HIPAA Safe Harbor de-identification system for healthcare AI applications. Automated detection and removal of all 18 PHI identifiers from clinical text per 45 CFR 164.514(b). Enables compliant AI model training and inference on protected health data. Built because most healthcare AI startups skip de-identification until it's a breach.
Guardian
Always-on AI memory and decision system. MCP server exposing 100+ tools, knowledge graph, RAG over hybrid search (sqlite-vec + FTS5). Orchestrates Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok. Dreamer consolidation engine derives facts with lineage; human-in-the-loop review gates what reaches model context.
ThisWeekEats
AI meal planning system with Stripe-integrated subscription payment processing. Constrained generation with hard rules for dietary preferences, time limits, favorites tracking. 100+ families testing. Planning time reduced from 2-3 hours to under 10 minutes.
DecisionForge
Multi-LLM debate engine for complex decisions. Evaluation harness with rubric-based scoring, dual-judge automation, regression suites. GitHub Actions CI/CD.
Technical Skills
Languages
C#, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, PHP, Java, Swift, Objective-C, SQL
Frameworks
ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core (.NET), React, Next.js, Node.js, Flutter, Ruby on Rails
Databases
SQL Server, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Firestore, MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB, Redis, SQLite, ChromaDB
Cloud & Infrastructure
AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (Firestore, Firebase, BigQuery), Vercel, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions CI/CD, Terraform
AI & ML
Claude Code (primary development tool), Claude API, OpenAI, Gemini, Grok, MCP (Model Context Protocol) server development, LangGraph, MCP tool-calling, pgvector, Ollama, Vector embeddings, RAG systems, Multi-LLM orchestration, LLM eval / LLM-judge harnesses, guardrails, human-in-the-loop review
Mobile
iOS (Swift, Objective-C), Android (Java, Kotlin), React Native, Flutter
Leadership
Global Engineering Management, Distributed Team Leadership, Engineering Organization Scaling, Engineering P&L Ownership, Budget & Vendor Management, Payment Processing & PCI-DSS Compliance, Regulated-Industry Operations
Key Metrics
Certifications
- HIPAA Certified — Privacy, security, and breach notification rules. Built and operated HIPAA-compliant systems handling PHI at scale; published HIPAA Safe Harbor de-identification tooling.
Current Work
Building AI-powered systems for healthcare and regulated industries. Primary development environment is Claude Code — all current projects built using AI-accelerated development workflows. Focused on production deployment of LLM capabilities with HIPAA compliance, data security, and governance built in from day one.