AEAugustus Engineering
LOCKansas, USA
Engineering manager by day · AI systems builder by night
AUGUSTUS ENGINEERING BUILDING USEFUL THINGS IN PUBLIC · KANSAS

I build software, hardware, and the occasional ridiculous prototype.

Engineering manager by day. AI systems builder by night. Augustus Engineering is where I explore ideas that don't fit neatly into a job description. Some become software. Some become hardware. Some become businesses. Most start with a question: "Can I build a better way?"

Currently Engineering Manager at Archer, Kansas City.
Looking for AI Engineer / Technical AI Engineering Manager roles — hands-on, agent systems, seed–Series B.
DOMAIN-A

Software

Practical apps, backends, and AI-assisted tooling.

  • 01Web & mobile apps
  • 02APIs & backends
  • 03AI-assisted features & automation
  • 04Data pipelines & visualization
  • 05Integrations that tie it all together
orchestrator.ts · tracev3.14.2
[14:02:11.084] svc.scheduler  → tick (gen=84211)
[14:02:11.087] svc.compute    ↘ accept job=J-7c1f
[14:02:11.099] svc.compute    · cgroup.bind cpu=4 mem=2Gi
[14:02:11.142] svc.compute    · model.warm  cache_hit=1
[14:02:11.318] svc.compute    ✓ job=J-7c1f t=219ms
[14:02:11.319] svc.scheduler  ← ack    queue_depth=3
DOMAIN A / SOFTWARE
DOMAIN-B

Hardware

Electronics, fabrication, and prototypes that physically exist.

  • 01Embedded electronics & sensors
  • 023D printing & fabrication
  • 03Cooling, thermal & power tinkering
  • 04Telemetry & monitoring
  • 05Real-world problem solving
encl-rev-B.dwg · isoø 1:1
160.00 mm 66.00 REV B · TOL ±0.05 · AL6061-T6 SHT 1/4
DOMAIN B / HARDWARE
BUILDING SOFTWARE
10+
years, professionally
DOMAINS
02
software & hardware
TEAM SIZE
01
just me, after hours
BASED IN
KS
Kansas, USA
CERTIFIED AWS Solutions Architect Associate
SECTION / 01 THE STORY
ORIGIN

Why Augustus Engineering exists.

I spent more than a decade building software professionally. Eventually I realized the projects I enjoyed most weren't assigned to me — they were the ones I couldn't stop thinking about after work.

Augustus Engineering is where those ideas live. Some become software. Some become hardware. Some become businesses. Every project starts with a problem worth solving and a willingness to learn whatever is necessary to solve it.

SECTION / 02 THE WORK
EXPERIENCE

Management scope, technical ownership, and shipping work.

The day-job track: leading engineers, making architecture calls, and keeping delivery moving without turning every decision into a ceremony.

01 Oct 2024 — Present
Archer Integrated Risk Management · Overland Park, KS

Engineering Manager

Team of 5

Manages the close-in work of engineering: 1:1s, growth plans, hiring, performance tracking, technical direction, and delivery outcomes.

Owns architecture and product decisions in a fast-moving environment, then keeps the path short enough for features to move from concept to production in days.

Pushes CI/CD and test strategy improvements so the team can ship faster without gambling on hope as a quality system.

02 Oct 2020 — Oct 2024
Orion Advisor Technology · Omaha, NE

Software Engineer

5-person team

Built resilient REST APIs for trading platforms, with the usual fun constraints: correctness, uptime, and financial systems that punish vague thinking.

Improved data processing speed by 50% with concurrency patterns and reduced CRUD execution by 30% through batching.

Raised code coverage by 5% and spent real time in reviews and pairing across experience levels.

03 Aug 2016 — Oct 2020
Americo Life Insurance Company · Kansas City, MO

Technical Lead

3-person team

Led a three-engineer team through a .NET Core and Azure migration, including the architecture roadmap and training paths needed to make it stick.

Introduced a blue/green deployment strategy and tightened the codebase enough to improve quality and maintainability by 20%.

Helped raise team capability by 30%, which is a more useful metric than pretending migrations succeed by diagram alone.

04 Aug 2012 — Aug 2016
Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City · Kansas City, MO

Software Engineer I / II

6-person team

Shipped enterprise software through a compliance-driven SDLC, where the work had to be documented, reviewed, and boring in the right places.

Led stakeholder sessions for requirements gathering, optimized data retrieval by 15%, and helped move legacy systems into MVC.

SECTION / 03 PORTFOLIO
WORK · SELECTED

Things I've built.

Real projects, started with a real problem. Some I use every day, some are still on the bench, some are just experiments that escaped the lab.

01 · SOFTWARE ACTIVE

BudgetScope

A personal grocery-spend tracker that turns paper and email receipts into structured purchase history. A vision pipeline (Tesseract OCR with an LLM fallback) extracts line items, prices, store, and date into a queryable price database — "where is milk cheapest?" — with a competitive-intelligence layer that mines competitor app reviews to surface unmet needs. Every dollar is grounded in a receipt you actually scanned.

BUILT WITH
.NET/C# FastAPI Plaid Firebase Postgres + pgvector MLX embeddings OCR + VLM fallback Swift/iOS
Personal finance · grocery
02 · SOFTWARE ACTIVE

Money Ledger

A personal finance platform built to answer a simple question: "Where did my money actually go?" It helps people understand spending behavior through automation, AI-powered receipt processing, and data visualization. Plaid integration and Celery async jobs demonstrate production-ready infrastructure for external data sync, background processing, and resilient financial workflows.

BUILT WITH
Angular FastAPI Plaid Celery AI receipts
Personal finance
03 · SOFTWARE ACTIVE

Health Journal

A natural-language health tracking application. Instead of filling out forms, you simply describe what happened — and the system organizes symptoms, events, food consumption, and timelines automatically.

FOCUS
Natural language Symptom tracking Timelines
Health & wellness
SECTION / 04 LEARNING IN PUBLIC
ACTIVE EXPERIMENTS

Questions I'm currently trying to answer.

Some of my time goes to questions with no client and no deadline — just curiosity. These are the experiments I'm running right now.

ACTIVE EXPERIMENTS
NO.STATEQUESTIONWHAT I'M EXPLORING
01 RUNNING How much of a software team can AI replace? Exploring agentic development workflows, AI-assisted product development, and autonomous software delivery systems.
02 RUNNING Can consumer hardware solve industrial problems? Testing inexpensive hardware, sensors, cooling systems, telemetry platforms, and monitoring solutions.
03 RUNNING What happens when software engineers build physical products? Exploring CAD, 3D printing, manufacturing, embedded systems, and product development.
SECTION / 05 PHILOSOPHY
WHAT I BELIEVE

Good engineering isn't about complexity. It's about making useful things.

The strongest thing I have isn't expertise — it's curiosity. Less "elite engineering consultancy," more one engineer constantly building, learning, and sharing what he discovers.

The best projects usually start small:

01

A problem worth solving

02

A willingness to learn

03

A prototype

04

A lot of iteration

That's how every project at Augustus Engineering begins.

SECTION / 06 LET'S TALK
CONTACT

If you're building something interesting, I'd like to hear about it.

I'm always up for trading notes, collaborating on something strange, or just talking shop. Drop a line below, or reach me directly.

SAY HELLO I READ EVERYTHING