Proof, Not Promises

What I Shipped, by Company

Today I lead engineering at SteadyIQ; before that, across three SaaS engineering organizations - hc1, GlobalMed, and Successware - I moved AI from pilot to production and modernized the platforms underneath. The specifics, by company, then the earlier FinTech and EdTech roles the domain range comes from:

• SteadyIQ - AI-native platform rewrite in production (GovTech income verification). Senior Director of Engineering, AI & Automation. Partnering with the CPO on product strategy and leading a rewrite of the legacy .NET application onto a modern TypeScript/Node/Python monorepo (Next.js, React, tRPC, better-auth, Supabase) with production AI on Google's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI) behind a custom failover and circuit-breaker. Partnered with Data Science to move from frontier LLMs to low-cost and open models - the team was paying for roughly 50x the capability it actually used - and designed in-house document OCR with a self-hosted vLLM (Qwen) fallback. Standardizing the team's AI workflows from individual experimentation into agentic team practice, under HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, with Plaid and Argyle powering financial and employment data verification.
• hc1 - AI-native SDLC in production (HealthTech analytics). Owned the AI-first initiative and operationalized agentic AI across the SDLC with Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, AWS Kiro, Gemini, and Snowflake Cortex as first-class pipeline stages. Results: 5x deploy frequency, 23% PR throughput gain, test coverage lifted from under 10% to 40% with no dedicated QA team, and new-engineer onboarding cut 70%. Shipped Source IQ (agentic supply-chain and contract intelligence) and led the Clinical IQ build with direct Epic EMR integration over HL7/FHIR.
• GlobalMed - platform rebuild and AI literacy (telehealth for the VA and White House Medical Unit). Led a .NET 8 rebuild that eliminated 65% of tech debt (a site I own) and lifted deployment frequency 25%, ran the company-wide AI Taskforce spanning Engineering, Product, QA, Operations, HR, and Finance, and closed 95% of critical vulnerabilities with the vCISO while holding HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 posture.
• Successware - scale and reliability (PE-backed B2B SaaS). Scaled engineering from 30 to 175+ over my tenure - 80% of that growth in a single nine-month window - across onshore, nearshore, and offshore, with 15+ Senior Managers and Directors reporting in, re-architected for 99.95% SLA at sub-second response for 10k+ concurrent users, and built the CI/CD foundation and Internal Developer Platform - code-to-release cycle time down 40%, manual QA effort down 30%, regression coverage up 45%, and MTTR down 30% on Datadog and Splunk.
• DebtPayPro - zero-downtime cloud migration (FinTech, bootstrapped debt-settlement SaaS). Head of Software Engineering. Joined as employee #38 to own engineering with 10+ direct reports, and led a zero-downtime data center to AWS migration (EC2, MariaDB) that coordinated 30+ vendor, payment-gateway, and finance integrations with no business disruption.
• Follett - twelve years of K-12 EdTech (Follett Learning and Follett School Solutions). Founded and ran the internal R&D startup chartered to accelerate K-12 product innovation - 10+ direct reports across engineering, UX, and QA, overseeing 25+ staff - and stood up the company's first true CI/CD practice. Before that, technical leadership across six SaaS products and the due diligence and integration of multiple acquisitions, with a fully distributed team from 2012 across four US sites and offshore engineers in India.

Different stacks, different industries, the same pattern: pick the right scope, prove value with shipping increments, instrument everything, and never let the rewrite freeze customer value. This isn't theory - it's what I've shipped.

What People Say

From engineers and executives who have worked alongside me.

Why RJ

A unique combination of technical depth, organizational leadership, and business acumen.

• Proven Business Impact. 20+ years leading engineering, with results that hold up: an org scaled 30 to 175+ over my tenure across onshore, nearshore, and offshore - 80% of that growth in a single nine-month window - at 99.95% SLA (Successware), a .NET 8 rebuild that retired 65% of tech debt (GlobalMed), and an AI-native SDLC delivering 5x deploy frequency, 23% PR throughput, and test coverage from under 10% to 40% (hc1).
• Industry Domain Breadth. Delivered results across GovTech (public benefits and income verification), HealthTech (HIPAA-compliant), EdTech (K-12 at Follett), FinTech (payment-gateway integrations at DebtPayPro), B2B SaaS, and PE-backed environments. Each domain's compliance and scale requirements handled from day one.
• Organizational Transformation. I don't just transform Engineering - I drive AI adoption across Operations, HR, and Product with change management, training programs, and executive alignment.
• Full-Spectrum Technical Expertise. Hands-on across the stack: C#/.NET, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Node.js, and Kotlin; AWS, Azure, and GCP with Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform; and Frontier LLMs (Claude, Copilot) wired into the SDLC through MCP and A2A. I make the architecture calls for distributed, data-driven systems and monolith-to-microservices modernization, then guide the specialists who build them.
• Team Leadership at Any Scale. I prefer small, high-ownership teams of 10 to 60 - but I've led onshore, nearshore, and offshore orgs past 175 engineers with servant leadership and a DevEx-first culture when the business demanded it.
• AI Governance & Risk. I build governance frameworks covering data privacy, IP ownership, model risk, compliance, and vendor strategy - responsible AI that earns board-level trust.