AI-first founder-engineer building agents for money movement, compliance, intelligence, trading, and high-stakes operations. Solo-built Pollinate Trading to $250K+ ARR. Currently building MAKO/x402 payment-agent workflows. Prior 500 Startups exit. Earlier: Iraq, State Dept, DoD, USMC.
I'm a hands-on AI-first founder-engineer. I build the product, the backend, the data layer, the agent workflow, the eval loop, and the operator-facing UX. My edge is turning ambiguous real-world problems into production systems people actually use.
Built Pollinate Trading to $250K+ ARR as a solo founder, owning product, P&L, customer base, frontend, backend, data, infra, backtesting, deployment, and support. Now building MAKO at Pollinate Research: x402 payment-agent workflows for autonomous agent commerce, with paid APIs, MCP tools, guardrails, observability, and evals.
Also built Visible Edge, an AI-assisted CMMC/compliance intelligence workflow, and Centinela Intel, a side project that automates roughly 95% of LATAM OSINT intelligence gathering. Prior 500 Startups founder with exit via acquisition of the technology and team.
Before startups, I spent 7 years in Iraq and related high-threat environments with State Dept, DoD, and Triple Canopy, after serving as a USMC infantry leader. That background makes me unusually useful in AI, crypto, defense, trading, compliance, and operational systems where mistakes matter.
Multi-step agent workflows with bounded responsibilities, tool/API orchestration, auditable state, structured outputs, human escalation, and eval loops. I care less about clever prompts and more about whether the system can recover, explain itself, and produce useful work every day.
Daily driver across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, and custom tooling. I use agents for research, implementation, review, test generation, refactors, and docs, then build the missing workflow glue when the tools fall short. The goal is velocity with judgment, not more code for its own sake.
Verifier · Pulse · Pricing Index · Reputation Score — all callable as paid x402 endpoints. A production-oriented trust layer for agent commerce: payment logic, tool calls, workflow state, guardrails, observability, evals, and MCP access for Claude Desktop, Cline, and MCP-native agents. Live at mako.pollinateresearch.com.
Solo-built fintech platform for systematic traders, grown to $250K+ ARR. Market-regime analysis, signal systems, risk dashboards, automated alerts, backtesting, and subscriber workflows — owned end-to-end.
Community of systematic traders shipping AI-built strategies 2× per week. Public /builds feed: regime filters, Monte Carlo prompts, scanners, position sizers, model bake-offs. Real systems, walk-forward validated.
Open-source longevity protocol platform. Your health data, your models, your hardware — a framework for personalized longevity protocols that doesn't ship your biology to a SaaS.
Super-light, session-locked AI coding terminal. One project. One tool. No drift. Built because every "AI IDE" I tried kept losing the thread halfway through a feature.
AI-assisted CMMC compliance intelligence workflow for defense contractors: federal data ingest, enrichment, opportunity scoring, AI-generated dossiers/openers, and a prioritized sales queue. Built to turn messy public data into operator-ready actions.
Interactive family genealogy site — 608+ years, 83 ancestors, 6 countries. Built to learn the data-viz stack I'd been avoiding.
Live tracker for "10 Predictions for 2026 That Nobody Is Pricing In." Public scorecard, updated as the year plays out.
~95% automation of OSINT intelligence gathering for LATAM-focused corporate security and EP teams. Turns noisy open-source signals into structured reports security teams can act on.
Predictive risk analytics startup for transportation. Selected for 500 Startups; exited via acquisition of the technology and team.
The through-line is simple: connect messy real-world systems, extract signal, decide what matters, and deliver action to the person who owns the outcome. In trading, compliance, security intelligence, and agent commerce, the useful system is the one that survives contact with reality.
I design agents as bounded workers with explicit tools, state, permissions, confidence thresholds, error paths, and traceable outputs. The goal is not to trust the model. The goal is to build a system where the model can be useful without being silently dangerous.
Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, and custom scripts are part of the build loop. I use agents to explore, implement, review, test, document, and compare approaches, then keep the judgment layer human. The system changes as better tools ship.
Data ingest, backtesting, market-regime detection, signal generation, risk dashboards, alert pipelines, and subscriber workflows. 26+ years in markets across equities, futures, FX, crypto, and bonds.
The Iraq/State Dept/DoD background shows up in the software: clear escalation paths, operator-first UX, audit trails, source confidence, and systems that tell humans what to do next instead of dumping more dashboards on them.
The strongest fit: founding engineer, Head of Agentic Systems, AI systems lead, FDE, or early technical hire at companies building agents for finance, defense, compliance, crypto, trading, or real-world operations.
Building MAKO and x402 payment-agent workflows on crypto-native rails. Designing agent primitives for tool orchestration, API integrations, workflow state, payment logic, guardrails, observability, and evals. Daily driver across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, and custom workflow tooling.
Solo-built fintech platform for systematic traders to $250K+ ARR. Product, frontend, backend, data, infra, backtesting, deployment, and customer workflows — all owned. Python · React/Next.js · Node · Postgres · AWS/Vercel.
Personal advisory and investment vehicle spanning crypto, systematic trading, and high-stakes security operations. Operated a crypto hedge fund across multiple market cycles; built custom software for security ops, reporting, and operational efficiency.
Predictive risk analytics for transportation. Selected for 500 Startups; exited via acquisition of the technology and team.
Built the Enterprise Security Plan from inception. Directed operations, budgets, government relations, and SOPs for high-risk-environment work across LATAM.
Directed multinational operations across the Middle East: 5,000+ personnel, $100M in U.S. government equipment, 24/7 tactical operations centers. Close protection for U.S. Embassy personnel, DoD facilities, and the President of Haiti during election transition.
Maritime Special Purpose Force, security element for MEU(SOC) Direct Action Platoon. Squad Leader, Security Forces, Guantanamo Bay.
Building MAKO. Open to founding engineer, Head of Agentic Systems, FDE, AI systems lead, and early technical hire roles where I can ship the first version, build the operating system, and help scale the team.