Senior Software Engineer

A senior, lead, or principal engineer role building complex applications with real ownership. My best work has come from being the person responsible for a system end to end, from data model through API through UI, and staying accountable for it in production rather than handing it off after launch. I want agentic AI development to be central to the work rather than a side practice. I use coding agents daily and have built a discipline around them: checkpoints with defined pass/fail markers I review myself, and test suites treated as contracts the agent is not allowed to modify. Used well by an experienced developer, they are a genuine multiplier, both for speed and for moving between stacks. Used carelessly they produce a lot of confident garbage, and knowing the difference is most of the skill. On team, I do best with a small group where I have direct access to the people who understand the business problem, whether that is product, operations, or a founder. Translating what a non-technical stakeholder actually needs into working software is a large part of what I do, and it goes badly through too many layers. Day to day I would expect to own architecture and implementation, set engineering practices around testing and code review, mentor other engineers, and be involved early when the problem is still being defined. Remote or hybrid in the Twin Cities.

I went to school for Game Development, this translated to a computer science degree with extra focus on graphics, graphics programming and networking. I graduated in 2012 and took a job working on control displays for ski boats. It turned out that my game development training translated better than I expected. Games teach you to care about performance, and user experience which turned out to matter just as much in non-game related applications. I spent seven years on marine and recreational vehicle systems. By the end I was managing up to eight concurrent client projects and doing the requirements gathering for them, which meant talking directly with customers. That is where I learned the hard part of software development is usually figuring out what a person really needs rather than writing the code. My next position was working on internal tools for an O&G company. This involved a more traditional stack focused on Angular, Entity Framework, and SQL Server. Throughout my time there I worked on many applications used by the whole company. I took ownership of two mission critical applications that were used for well forecasting and financial planning. As well as smaller from scratch applications that were used for aviation safety and vendor compliance. Throughout all of this I have kept up with working on games. I recently released my first self-published game on Steam. That has been a real education on the business and marketing side as much as the technical one. As agentic AI tools have become more capable, I have been working out how to integrate them properly. Used well they dramatically increase how fast an experienced developer can work and make it much easier to move between stacks. The part that took actual effort was learning where they failed. I structure work around checkpoints I review myself and treat a passing test suite as a contract the agent is not allowed to modify, so a failure surfaces instead of getting quietly papered over.