# Ken Barlow

**Founder, Recovea, Inc.** — Lehi, UT, United States

> 14+ years building production systems at scale: identity for millions, PCI-audited payments, distributed Go services with elite DORA metrics, and now an LLM gateway with cost controls and tamper-evident audit trails.

Career Archetype: **Frontier Navigator** (RS-DG) — One of the first Frontier Navigators on Saywise

## Links

- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/knbrlo
- Recovea: https://recovea.ai/

## Experience

### CEO & Founder, Recovea, Inc. (2026-06 – present)
Lehi, UT, remote · 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.

### CTO & Co-Founder, Allset Industries Group, Inc. (2025-07 – 2026-08)
Lehi, UT, remote · 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.

### Principal Software Engineer and Engineering Manager, LR, Inc. (2016-03 – 2026-04)
Lehi, UT · 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.

### Senior Software Engineer & Engineering Manager, Nexio (2015-02 – 2016-03)
Orem, UT · 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.

### Software Engineer, Start Studio (2011-12 – 2015-02)
Provo, UT · Built 6 web and mobile products from scratch across timekeeping, fitness, sports, social, CRM and health. Developed a BLE-based 3D-coordinate tracking system serving 5,000+ users.

### Engineering Manager, Microsoft (2009-03 – 2011-12)
Salt Lake City, UT

## Skills

Go, Rust, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, AWS, Terraform, Terragrunt, Docker, PostgreSQL, Aurora, RDS Proxy, Redis, DynamoDB, SpiceDB, Cognito, GitHub Actions, React, React Native, Liquibase, distributed systems, monolith decomposition, event-driven architecture, zero-downtime migrations, observability, on-call incident response, LLM integration, LLM-as-judge, tool-calling agents, ReBAC, identity management, PCI-DSS, audit trails, least privilege, fine-grained authorization, CI/CD, REST APIs, Stripe

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Source: https://saywise.com/member2346 (last modified 2026-10-05T20:44:52.986Z)