AI-Native Principal Engineer · Product-to-Production Architect

Leif Taylor

I translate ambiguous business requirements into secure, scalable, revenue-producing systems — using agentic workflows to move from idea to production at exceptional speed.

More than a decade in production engineering, principal architecture, DevOps leadership, and AI-native delivery. I operate across product translation, full-stack implementation, infrastructure, testing, and observability. The new paradigm collapses the boundaries between those roles; this page is what one operator looks like in that paradigm.

Schedule 30 minLinkedIn

NOWShipping the direct-to-supplier ordering platform at ConnectBase · Spearheading agentic dev workflows in production

How I work.

I work end-to-end. One operator across product translation, architecture, full-stack code, tests, infrastructure, and production — agentic workflows for speed, deep architectural judgment for trust.

Where a 2019 team spent a quarter coordinating handoffs across specialists, I ship a working system in weeks. Same correctness bar. Same operability bar. Aimed at the business outcome the brief actually asked for.

  1. $600K · 2 mo

    Azure spend reduction at ConnectBase. Same product, same headcount — architectural and operational discipline did the work, and the savings landed inside the first quarter.

  2. Distributed CPQ

    Re-architected ConnectBase’s telecom CPQ engine from a coordination-heavy monolith into a distributed, worker-driven quoting platform — concurrent quote computation, fault isolation, horizontal scale, and bulk pricing across complex multi-location connectivity scenarios.

  3. 0 → 1

    Direct-to-Supplier Ordering at ConnectBase. Greenfield concept to production in months — wholesalers and channel partners now purchase from thousands of suppliers in one interface.

  4. 1M+ products

    Architected the data and search layer for Chemveric’s B2B chemical marketplace — multi-source ingestion, CAS-aware catalog normalization, faceted discovery, and structured search across millions of products and thousands of supplier records.

  5. Email → RFQ

    Converted fragmented pharma procurement (emails, spreadsheets, vendor portals) into a structured RFQ workflow at Chemveric — buyer/supplier portals, RFQ lifecycle state, quote normalization, side-by-side comparison, and procurement audit trail.

  6. AI matching

    Built AI-assisted supplier-matching and R&D workflow primitives for Chemveric — semantic retrieval and capability scoring across chemistry expertise, scale, geography, timelines, and regulatory constraints, with structured RFQ intelligence on top.

  7. Multi-module IaC

    Built the Terraform / Kubernetes deployment substrate for Mobile Heartbeat’s modular cloud-native healthcare communication platform — repeatable provisioning, secrets, ingress, observability, and CI/CD across independently deployable clinical modules.

  8. AI moderation

    Architected the trust-and-safety layer for Imprint.live, an AI-driven social platform — OpenAI-powered content classification, moderation queues, policy enforcement, human-review boundaries, and audit trails across user-generated content workflows.

  9. Manual → Automated

    Took Actifio’s manual regression and feature testing into a fully automated platform — environment provisioning across a real data-center matrix: Oracle / MySQL / Postgres × RAC / single-node × 11g–18c × HP-UX / AIX / Solaris / Ubuntu / CentOS / Red Hat. Coverage and reporting baked in.

Selected architecture & delivery work.

A handful of named systems with the operational and business problems they solved. Implementation details are in the experience section below.

  • ConnectBase

    Distributed Pricing Engine

    Reengineered the monolithic pricing engine into a worker-driven microservice mesh — fault-isolated, horizontally scalable, concurrent. Work that traditionally required a small platform team.

    • Concurrent quote computation across heterogeneous supplier tariffs
    • Fault-isolated worker model — bad inputs no longer take down the engine
    • Horizontal scale-out path the legacy engine couldn’t support
    • Distributed workers
    • Pricing
    • Stateless
    • Scalability

  • ConnectBase

    Direct-to-Supplier Ordering

    Greenfield 0→1 — translated a multi-supplier purchasing problem into one unified interface. Chief developer and technical owner from spec through production.

    • 0→1 product, greenfield architecture
    • Multi-supplier order routing, normalization, and reconciliation
    • Foundation for the next generation of ConnectBase commerce flows
    • Greenfield
    • B2B Commerce
    • Multi-tenant
    • Domain modeling

  • ConnectBase

    AI-Driven Supplier Ingestion

    LLM-driven catalog ingestion and semantic retrieval that runs on its own — replaces what would have been an ongoing data-ops team.

    • 10K+ supplier products processed weekly with no human in the loop on the happy path
    • Semantic knowledge-base search across the entire ingested corpus
    • Foundation for downstream intelligence: TAM, gap analysis, recommendations
    • RAG
    • Semantic search
    • LLM workflows
    • Data ingestion

  • ConnectBase

    Cloud Cost Program

    FinOps-style discipline across Azure — $600K saved in 2 months through architectural and configuration choices, not headcount cuts or feature freezes.

    • $50K+ monthly spend reduction
    • $600K annualized savings
    • ~30% reduction in total cloud expenditure
    • Azure
    • FinOps
    • Operational discipline

Experience.

Production engineering, principal architecture, DevOps leadership, and consulting — in date order.

  1. 2023 — Present
    CURRENT

    ConnectBase

    Principal Engineer

    2025 — Present

    • Reengineered the monolithic pricing engine into a distributed worker-driven architecture (concurrent quote computation, fault isolation, horizontal scale)
    • Modernized legacy VM-era patterns into stateless, horizontally-scalable services
    • Chief developer and technical owner of the Direct-to-Supplier Ordering platform — wholesalers and channel partners purchase from thousands of suppliers in one interface
    • Integrated AI-assisted workflows for supplier ingestion, semantic search, TAM analysis, and data-layer intelligence
    • Daily use of agentic dev workflows (Claude Code, sub-agent orchestration, MCP-style tool integration) across implementation, refactoring, and architecture iteration
    • Built and maintains the team operating patterns for AI-augmented delivery — when to delegate to an agent, where the human-in-the-loop boundary sits, how to validate generated work

    ↑ Promoted to Principal Engineer

    ConnectBase

    Director of DevOps

    2023 — 2025

    • Reduced Azure spend by $50K+/month → $600K+ annualized savings, in 2 months
    • Modernized 30+ legacy VM-hosted services into stateless, horizontally-scalable microservices
    • Built CI/CD across 30+ heterogeneous services (Java, TypeScript / Node, Python, C#)
    • Stood up enterprise-wide feature-flag, secrets-management, and progressive (canary) delivery infrastructure
    • Stood up unit / functional / e2e coverage across the suite using AI-assisted test authorship
    • Disaster-recovery and outage point person
  2. 2025 — 2026

    Chemveric

    Technical Director

    Architected and led end-to-end development of a B2B SaaS cheminformatics marketplace connecting buyers and suppliers of research chemicals and materials. Multi-tenant NestJS / Postgres / RDKit / AWS, with AI-assisted ingestion, RFQ workflows, and funding-opportunity matching.

    • NestJS
    • PostgreSQL
    • RDKit
    • AWS
    • Marketplace
  3. 2022 — Present

    Alacrity Solutions

    Founding Member · Principal Architect

    AI consulting practice helping F500s operationalize LLMs for software development, customer support, finance, compliance, and scientific data. Delivered work for global tax-tech, computational-science, and industrial-chemistry clients.

    • RAG
    • Compliance
    • Scientific data
    • LLMs
  4. 2022 — 2023

    Imprint.live

    CTO · Principal Architect

    Led development of an AI-driven social platform — OpenAI-powered moderation, synthetic-user systems, user-value analytics for stakeholders.

    • OpenAI
    • Moderation
    • Social platform
  5. 2023 — 2024

    Open Interpreter

    Contributor

    The desktop app for AI power users — let agents edit files, control apps, and learn new skills. Contributor to local-LLM execution patterns. 64k+ stars on GitHub.

    • Local LLMs
    • Agentic tooling
    • Open source
    github.com/openinterpreter/open-interpreter
  6. 2019 — 2023

    Mobile Heartbeat

    Principal DevOps Lead

    Promoted from Senior DevOps Engineer

    • Designed a serverless internal application testing framework, fully Terraform-driven, integrated into CI/CD
    • Built CI/CD for multitenant microservice apps on Azure — Terraform + Flux/Helm + Kubernetes + automated test deployment + DB bootstrapping
    • Designed CI/CD pipelines for iOS and Android mobile applications
    • Customer-release support across Android, iOS, and Windows platforms
  7. 2016 — 2019

    Actifio

    Head of DevOps

    Promoted from DevOps Intern → Lead → Head

    • Chief developer of the automated regression testing framework — Python/Node + Docker + Ansible + Jenkins + Robot Framework
    • Managed 100+ dev databases (Oracle, SQL Server) and 2,000+ VMs across on-prem ESXi, Hyper-V, physical hosts, and AWS EC2
    • Travelled to India to mentor and code-review the distributed engineering team
    • Built developer-portal tooling: test execution, host management, log analysis

Toolkit.

AI / LLM Systems
  • OpenAI
  • Anthropic
  • Azure OpenAI
  • Amazon Bedrock
  • Vertex AI
  • Claude Code
  • Cursor
  • MCP
  • LangChain
  • LangGraph
  • LlamaIndex
  • tool-calling agents
  • structured outputs
  • function calling
  • RAG
  • multi-agent systems
  • agent orchestration
  • eval harnesses
  • prompt-version control
  • AI observability
  • HITL workflows
  • local LLMs
  • Ollama
  • context engineering
Retrieval / Data Intelligence
  • Pinecone
  • Weaviate
  • Qdrant
  • Milvus
  • Chroma
  • FAISS
  • pgvector
  • Elasticsearch / OpenSearch vector search
  • hybrid retrieval
  • BM25
  • embeddings
  • reranking
  • cross-encoder rerankers
  • metadata filtering
  • chunking strategies
  • document ingestion
  • OCR / unstructured extraction
  • entity resolution
  • deduplication
  • knowledge graphs
  • LangSmith
  • Langfuse
  • RAGAS
Application Engineering
  • TypeScript
  • Node.js
  • NestJS
  • Express
  • Fastify
  • Next.js
  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • Pydantic
  • Django
  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • C#
  • .NET
  • ASP.NET Core
  • React
  • React Native
  • Angular
  • Svelte / SvelteKit
  • Vite
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Storybook
  • TanStack Query
  • REST
  • GraphQL
  • gRPC
  • WebSockets
  • OpenAPI
  • webhooks
  • OAuth2
  • OIDC
  • JWT
  • SAML
  • SCIM
  • API gateways
  • idempotency
  • rate limiting
Cloud / Platform / DevOps
  • Azure
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Cloudflare
  • Kubernetes
  • AKS
  • EKS
  • ECS
  • AWS Lambda
  • Azure Functions
  • Cloudflare Workers / Pages
  • Docker
  • Terraform
  • Pulumi
  • Helm
  • Flux
  • Argo CD
  • Ansible
  • Vault
  • GitHub Actions
  • Azure DevOps
  • GitLab CI
  • Jenkins
  • CircleCI
  • serverless
  • service mesh
  • platform engineering
  • internal developer platforms
  • golden paths
  • Backstage
  • feature flags
  • progressive delivery
  • canary deploys
  • blue/green
  • FinOps
Data / Distributed Systems
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • SQL Server
  • Oracle
  • CockroachDB
  • Aurora
  • MongoDB
  • DynamoDB
  • Redis
  • Snowflake
  • BigQuery
  • Databricks
  • TimescaleDB
  • Elasticsearch
  • Kafka
  • RabbitMQ
  • SQS / SNS
  • EventBridge
  • Temporal
  • worker queues
  • sagas
  • outbox pattern
  • CQRS
  • event sourcing
  • CDC
  • dbt
  • Airflow
  • Spark
  • sharding
  • replication
Reliability / Security / Quality
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Datadog
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • distributed tracing
  • structured logging
  • SLOs / SLIs
  • error budgets
  • incident command
  • postmortems
  • runbooks
  • on-call
  • DR
  • load testing
  • k6
  • OWASP Top 10
  • IAM
  • RBAC / ABAC
  • zero trust
  • secrets management
  • audit logging
  • PII handling
  • supply-chain security
  • Jest
  • Vitest
  • Pytest
  • Playwright
  • AI-assisted test authorship
  • LLM regression evals
  • golden datasets

Available for principal architecture, AI systems strategy, and fractional technical leadership.

Greater Boston Area · Open to remote and hybrid engagements. Best for complex cloud, AI, product, and delivery work where architecture and business outcomes converge.

Contact

Code samples available on request — most repositories are private under client NDAs.