JUSTIN VINCENT

Los Angeles, CA · justinvincent@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/justinvincent · github.com/jv2222

Software engineer with 25+ years shipping production systems, more than a decade as a CTO who never stopped coding. Now focused on AI-native engineering: shipping product daily while building the agent workflows and developer tooling that make AI-driven development work for real teams.

EXPERIENCE

Friendbuy, Remote · Principal Engineer, AI Enablement (Oct 2025–Present)

Helped lead our 12-person engineering team's move to AI-driven development, designing and building the tooling while shipping product.

• Built and deployed AI code review (Claude-powered CLI + GitHub Action) across every company repository, moving first-pass review to agents so human reviewers focus on architecture.
• Built the team's shared AI context system: a self-updating daemon syncing versioned codebase knowledge, per-ticket context, and skills into every developer's Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex.
• Developed production agent workflows for code review, CI repair from real build logs, and AI test-honesty auditing (catching tests that fake their own passes).
• Built the company's local development environment: one command runs the entire 40-repo microservice stack offline, with AWS emulation, Terraform-derived resource bootstrap, and production drift detection, unlocking a fully local AI development loop for every engineer. Adopted team-wide.
• Hands-on product engineering and production operations across multi-tenant, event-driven AWS systems (Lambda, DynamoDB, Kinesis, TypeScript/Node).

Innerloop Software, Los Angeles · Founder (2025–Present)

Independent R&D: AI agent infrastructure and realtime systems.

• Breadcrumb: a local AI context layer for Mac. Breadcrumb connects across Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cursor, and opencode.
• Lightspeed: an open-source, Pusher-compatible realtime server for Laravel, built as a lightweight self-hosted alternative to managed realtime infrastructure. Swoole, multi-worker, Redis relay, multi-instance clustering.

Modern Teacher, Remote · Exec Team Member & CTO (2013–2025)

Built and led engineering for an edTech platform used by 700+ school districts; acquired by Stride K12 (NYSE: LRN).

• Architected the multi-tenant real-time SaaS platform ($10m+ raised); hands-on across Laravel/PHP, Node, MySQL, RabbitMQ, and AWS.
• Automated multi-region infrastructure that held 99.99% uptime for 5+ years.
• Employee #1 on the founding team; hired and led 7 engineers + QA, and took the platform from first commit through acquisition.

Pluggio, Remote · Founder (2009–2013)

Bootstrapped a social-media SaaS to 25,000 users solo, covering product, infrastructure, and growth, and sold the company.

Earlier: Sky Television · Knexus Group (CTO) · Reed Elsevier (Senior Web Developer) · Visunet (Web Developer)

CORE EXPERTISE

• AI engineering: agent infrastructure · context systems · MCP · automated code review · CI/QA agents · Claude Code / Cursor / Codex
• Systems: distributed & event-driven architecture · real-time collaboration · multi-tenant SaaS · AWS & infrastructure as code · Swift · TypeScript/Node · PHP/Laravel

OUTSIDE WORK

Co-host, TechZing podcast · former frontman of an Irish 2000s rock band