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SHEET 02 — BIOGRAPHY

Two careers,
one instinct.

I'm Travis Carter, a Software Architect who learned the same thing twice: understand what the structure has to carry before you draw the details.

I spent a decade in civil engineering, drafting plans for golf courses, shopping complexes, and the Palm Islands in Dubai. When the 2008 recession ended that career, I taught myself to code and built another one.

What civil engineering gave me is an instinct for load-bearing design. That has shaped everything since: systems built around their failure modes, architectures where the root cause is obvious at 3 AM, clear boundaries that hold up when the load changes.

§ CAREER LOAD PATH
1998 2002 2006 2010 2014 2018 2022
Civil Eng
DRAFTSMAN / DESIGNER
1998–2009
Frontend Dev
JS / SPA WORK
2011–2014
Banjo
SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER
2014–2020
Globality
SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER
2020–2021
PHC
DIRECTOR, PLATFORM ENGINEERING
2021–2024
ECFX
SOFTWARE ARCHITECT
2023–Now
§ DETAILED HISTORY

ECFX

SOFTWARE ARCHITECT Oct 2023 — Present

Software Architect at a law-tech startup; sole owner of DevOps and infrastructure. Architected and led the build of a config-driven, DAG-based document-processing platform: four Micronaut services over RabbitMQ that replace 534 court-specific processor classes with ten generic pipeline stages, so onboarding a court is validated configuration instead of code, plus a standalone JWT auth service and a Vue operator dashboard. Refactored CI/CD pipelines to cut build times from 45 minutes to under 10 with selective build and deploy. Led a Micronaut 4 and Hibernate 6 upgrade across a six-year-old codebase with no existing test coverage, using Claude Code workflows and a TDD-first approach that closed over 50 Jira tickets in two weeks, then moved the new platform onto Micronaut 5 and Java 25. Presented AI-augmented development methodology to engineering leadership, and have been writing publicly about context engineering and agent-driven development.

PHC

DIRECTOR OF PLATFORM ENGINEERING Oct 2021 — Mar 2024

Led platform engineering at a health-tech Series A startup. Owned architecture, system design, and the development roadmap. Built a real-time risk anomaly detection and notification platform from scratch using Flink, Elasticsearch, Protobufs, and Micronaut. Created a custom Flink StateFun mixed-language framework supporting processors in both Java and Python.

Globality

SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER Oct 2020 — Oct 2021

Implemented Kubernetes cluster architecture and deployed vCluster (Loft) to give the engineering team sandboxed development environments, improving developer workflow across a 20-person engineering org.

Banjo

SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER Aug 2014 — Aug 2020

Six formative years at a fast-paced startup building real-time event processing and anomaly detection systems. Built an automation API that cut discovery-to-notification times from 7 minutes to under 30 seconds. Created an inter-agency coordination framework used by law enforcement, fire, and safety agencies. Worked across the full stack in an environment where everyone shared knowledge and owned everything. This is where my conviction around event-driven architecture was built, in production, under pressure, at scale.

Frontend Developer

JS / SPA WORK Nov 2011 — Aug 2014

Early software career building JavaScript SPAs and UX. Rewrote an ASP.NET site into a true single-page application using Knockout.js and Durandal.js.

Civil Engineering

DRAFTSMAN & PROJECT DESIGNER 1998 — 2009

Over a decade of plan creation, project design, and engineering approvals. Drafted plans for Big Horn Golf Course in Palm Springs, designed the Blue Diamond shopping complex in Las Vegas, and trained engineers in Dubai on Autodesk Civil 3D for the Palm Islands project. Self-taught AutoCAD before graduating high school. When the 2008 recession hit, I taught myself to code and pivoted to software.

§ MATERIAL SPEC
LANGUAGES
  • Java
  • Kotlin
  • TypeScript
  • Python
STREAMING & MESSAGING
  • Apache Flink
  • Apache Kafka
  • RabbitMQ
  • gRPC
  • Protobuf
  • Elasticsearch
FRAMEWORKS
  • Micronaut
  • Spring Boot
  • Vue
  • Astro
  • React
INFRA
  • AWS
  • EKS
  • Terraform
  • Docker
PRACTICES
  • DDD
  • Event Sourcing
  • TDD
  • Context Engineering

Philosophy

I believe the best engineering comes from deeply understanding what a system has to carry before deciding how to build it. I value simplicity, clear boundaries, and architectures that are easy to reason about. When something breaks at 3 AM, the design should make the root cause obvious.

That same instinct applies to how I think about AI-assisted development. The engineers who get the most out of these tools are the ones who already had discipline: good documentation, meaningful tests, clear architectural context. The tools amplify the foundation you give them. If the foundation is weak, they amplify that too.

I have spent a long time believing that doing the work right was worth the investment even when it was slower. The past year has confirmed it. Doing the work right is now the thing that scales.

What I'm Building

I am particularly drawn to problems at the boundaries between systems: event-driven architectures, streaming pipelines, and the tooling that makes engineering teams productive.

That includes the boundary I have been working at most actively over the past year, between human architectural judgment and AI-driven execution. I am building toward a startup in this space: EventHorizon and AgentFlow, a context-driven agent orchestration engine that has its roots in years of work on event-driven platform design.

I also maintain several open-source libraries on Maven Central: tools for Protocol Buffer testing, Elasticsearch integrations, and Micronaut extensions. Reusable abstractions that help other developers move faster without solving the same problems twice.