JUSTIN VINCENT

Los Angeles, CA · justinvincent@gmail.com

justinvincent.com · github.com/jv2222 · linkedin.com/in/justinvincent

Software engineer with 25+ years shipping production systems, more than a decade as a CTO who never stopped coding. Now building AI-native systems: agent workflows, and the telemetry that makes them observable, from capturing raw activity to serving it to AI over MCP.

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 flight recorder for AI development on Mac. It captures every app, meeting and agent session, processes it locally into moments, chapters and days, and serves it to Claude Code, Cursor and Codex over MCP. It also puts your rules and memory in front of every AI.
• 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 · Various Harnesses
• 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