Kevin Badinger

Hands-on production-AI engineering practice; builds and operates AI systems and platforms across regulated and enterprise domains.

Advisory and cleanup engagements across healthcare, finance, logistics, transportation, and state government — evaluating AI-built and legacy systems and rebuilding what shipped before anyone understood it.

Retained as a technical expert witness in technology litigation — expert reports and depositions.

Production AI and Engineering Practice (2023 – Present)

• Ship production AI systems end to end — autonomous AI agents, multi-agent workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, MCP servers, and multi-LLM orchestration across Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok — in Python and TypeScript on AWS, including Guardian (a persistent-memory agent platform with a knowledge graph), ThisWeekEats (~130k LOC), ReadReceipt, and PenForge.
• Built and direct Ralph, an autonomous AI developer agent, building Qtown (qtown.ai), a polyglot distributed-systems simulation spanning 12 languages and 9 microservices (Go, Rust, Python, LangGraph, TypeScript, Kafka, gRPC, GraphQL, ~100K lines of code), through story-level acceptance criteria, per-task model routing, code review gates, and an audit and verification loop; the agent wrote 88% of v1 across 1,451 commits and still writes most of v2.
• Built a multi-LLM adversarial evaluation panel with human-in-the-loop gating — four independent model votes with research grounding, an adversarial refutation pass, confidence-weighted aggregation, and human sign-off before any decision ships.
• Shipped Charted (charted.work), a free public career-discovery engine built on O*NET data — production cutover on Vercel and Railway with a custom domain, no account required.
• Published HIPAA Safe Harbor de-identification tooling (hipaa-de-id, public repository) — detects and transforms all 18 Safe Harbor identifier categories across text, CSV, JSON, FHIR R4, and HL7v2, with a PHI-stripping proxy for LLM API traffic and an encrypted re-identification store with audit trail.
• Built an LLM-judged voice-fidelity evaluation (letter grade, 0–100 score, itemized fixes) with a learn-from-edit loop that extracts semantic style rules from user edits into a persisted per-user model.
• Built a public evaluation and monitoring gate for PenForge's LLM grader — a golden test set with known answers, model-judged scoring, a CI check that blocks releases when accuracy drops, and per-call cost and latency tracing with OpenTelemetry.
• Deployed Charted's scoring service on Amazon Web Services — Bedrock, Lambda and ECS, provisioned with Terraform.
• Run ThisWeekEats on a managed Kubernetes cluster (DigitalOcean) — containerized services, rolling deploys and autoscaling.
• Operate these systems with production discipline — data pipelines, evaluation harnesses, observability, and rollback — applying modern SDLC and AI-assisted development to ship quickly without sacrificing quality.

Rail Track-and-Trace Platform and RailVantage (Architect and Builder, 2012 – Present)

• Operate the live rail track-and-trace platform I built for a rail-logistics client, running real operational data from Class I railroads — real-time integrations with two Class I railroads and a waybill feed from a third, sub-3-second routing across 10,000+ point networks, and offline-first Flutter field apps for rail crews.
• Extended it in 2026 into RailVantage, a mobile-first rail-operations product that absorbed a railroad car repair billing system (an AAR-mandated market), now live with real waybill data.

Architected and built the Conductor platform from 2002, bringing it into nurse aide credentialing in 2004; formed Credentia in 2014 as the operating company and served as Chairman, President and Managing Partner through 2023 while remaining Conductor's hands-on chief technical architect throughout. Bootstrapped, profitable from year one, no outside funding; exited 2023, with platform support winding down through 2024.

• One continuous platform grown from point solutions into the system powering a nationwide U.S. nurse aide testing and credentialing program: 1M+ certifications across 35+ states, 99.9% uptime, zero known breaches.
• Built and launched CNA365, a nurse aide credentialing system that moved every state program off the incumbent's legacy systems in about six weeks (January–February 2022), with online applications, electronic training verification, and an online remote-proctored written exam at no fee increase.
• Became the official test administrator for the national nurse-aide exam in 2022 after buying Pearson VUE's nurse aide testing business in 2021; administered 65,000+ skills exams and 54,000+ written exams in 2022 across 13 states and U.S. territories, including state registries.
• Led a multi-team engineering organization across the U.S., India, Serbia, and Brazil — ~30 engineers at any one time, with 80+ hired and developed over the tenure — running day-to-day engineering directly across all time zones; set code-review, design-review, and engineering standards; sub-5% annual voluntary engineering turnover across the run.
• Operated real-time data pipelines and a published external API layer (authentication, scheduling, scoring, reporting) on Microsoft Azure, integrating candidate-management systems, credential-verification services, and state registries: bidirectional exchange on a regulated, high-availability platform with strict data consistency and auditability.
• Engineered for deliberate demand spikes: quarterly exam-offer releases at 7 PM in each nurse's local timezone created thundering-herd load, solved in stages — load balancing, client-side refresh caps, per-user throttling across devices and sessions; at peak, 500 nurses filled thousands of offers in under 10 seconds.
• Ran human-in-the-loop operations at scale: a proctor and evaluator workforce executing high-stakes certification exams, recurring audit programs (humans auditing the human scorers), and automated escalation with human fallback.
• Met the compliance bar of state contracts and their RFPs: SOC 2 and PCI-DSS attestations, multi-state regulatory compliance, and a HIPAA-adjacent regulated environment handling state-designated PHI.
• Shipped SCORE, a mobile OCR scoring application that turned paper answer sheets into structured, machine-scored data in the field, feeding the automated credentialing pipeline.

• Owned end-to-end delivery of two enterprise SaaS platforms over nine years in production — a general flooring-installation platform and a senior-living maintenance platform — serving major senior-living operators, plus a Fannie Mae property-services line.
• Built the senior-living maintenance platform around automated room turns — community floor plans in-system; selecting a room triggered bid requests, contractor scheduling, and next-day completion — covering construction-grade maintenance (flooring, painting, construction repairs) across communities.
• Designed the automated workflow engine (request to approval to installation to payment to survey) with Salesforce/CRM and bidirectional QuickBooks integrations; 85% worker-productivity gain, 53% faster turnaround, 10K+ daily transactions across the business.

• Built and support IntelliSite, the document-management platform for a national RV-resort operator — a client engagement ongoing since 2005.
• Built systems for small and mid-size businesses — a global shipping integration for a reshipper and plant-nursery management — and ran SEO that moved 50+ sites to Google's first page for 20+ clients.

• Principal Software Architect, ReconNET LCM — banking reconciliation and compliance platform serving 300+ Fortune 1000 financial institutions, with clients including a top US bank, a regional bank, a major US investment firm and national retailers; primary architect of LCM Payments (.NET) with real-time fraud prevention and behavioral anomaly detection on live payment streams.
• Designed a custom object-relational mapping layer supporting SQL Server, Oracle, Informix, and DB2 behind one abstraction; 100x performance improvement via SQL Server and Oracle tuning (published work); reversed sales win/loss from 0% to 100% in one quarter through a GUI redesign.

Earlier

IBM, Sales Engineer; Texas Instruments, Software Engineer; DSC Communications, Senior Software Design Engineer

• DSC Communications: built embedded broadband cross-connect test systems that cut manufacturing test costs 50% (~$1M/year savings, ~$500K per installation).
• Texas Instruments: converted an IMS mainframe semiconductor machine-tracking system to a distributed object-oriented architecture (Smalltalk, GemStone), tuned to 40 transactions/second; 24x7 support across 12 customer sites.