Ken Barlow

Built a release gate that uses cross-family LLM-as-judge scoring to gate model optimizations, preventing a model from grading its own work. Shipped a bring-your-own-key LLM gateway with live metering, spend attribution, and budget caps that fail closed. Designed a hash-chained receipt ledger that finance teams can verify offline without trusting the gateway.

Built an AI-native platform for services and trades using LLM workflows on Claude and OpenAI, with all infrastructure as Terraform/Terragrunt IaC. Gated agent tool calls through SpiceDB ReBAC over an immutable audit log to track what agents did and were allowed to do. Ran delivery entirely agent-first with Claude Code and Cursor, reviewing every line shipped.

Grew engineering org from 3 to 15 while remaining top committer at 40% of code. Led hands-on re-architecture from .NET/Azure monolith to distributed Go services on AWS, achieving 15-minute lead time and 5% change-failure rate (elite DORA). Owned identity for 3M+ accounts on Cognito with zero-downtime migration, PCI-DSS card processing, Postgres at scale, and cut $1.5M+ annual AWS spend through decommissioning and rightsizing.

Led 8-engineer team shipping SaaS web and mobile apps for 72,000+ customers. Recovered $50K+ by fixing tax-calculation defects and building in-app support tooling. Reduced support response time from days to hours.