Engineering leader. 18 years building payments, trading, and back-office systems, and 5+ years leading distributed teams. Based in Vancouver, BC.
- Payments and money movement. Built a team of 4 from scratch at Arcesium (a D. E. Shaw spin-off) and led a wire transfer platform for hedge fund and asset management back offices, handling 50 to 100 wires a day up to about $20M per wire under same-day cut-offs. Architected its SWIFT messaging layer, so field-level MT103, MT202 and MT202COV construction, ACK/NACK handling, and MT900/MT910 reconciliation. Moved it from an internal application to multi-tenant SaaS on AWS with an amount-based approval rules engine.
- Trading and back office. Eight years at D. E. Shaw, ending as project leader over API-based trade services and a flexible trade data model covering equities, repos, FX and swaps, giving back-office and finance teams one view for reconciliation, positions and P&L. Cut manual trade booking time about 6x.
- E-commerce and identity. Headless commerce at Elastic Path for merchants including T-Mobile, The Pokemon Company and Charlotte Tilbury. Stripe payment integration, OpenID Connect SSO, and a cart promotions engine. Managed 3 engineers in an 11-person distributed team across Canada and Europe and cut sprint-goal failure 20%.
- purpl-brain: decision memory and a pre-action guardrail for codebases edited by multiple independent AI coding agents. An agent calls
analyze_impactover MCP to see which prior decisions a change would break before it writes code. Neo4j decision graph plus Qdrant semantic search, so contradictions that share no wording are still caught. Write-up. - career-ops interview modes: plan, practice, and debrief modes plus the session-transcript producer, merged into santifer's career-ops. Built to its never-fabricate rule; other contributors' features now build on the transcript format.
- Repo-context-aware AI code review: RAG over repository context (n8n, Qdrant, LLMs) that generates project-specific feedback on GitHub pull requests.
Java, Spring Boot, JavaScript · distributed systems, microservices, event-driven · SWIFT MT, Stripe, OpenID Connect · PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server · AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, SQS), Docker, CI/CD · RAG, MCP servers, agent memory and guardrails · Neo4j, Qdrant, Claude Code, Ollama
AWS Certified Generative AI Developer (Professional) · AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate)