Carl Taylor

20+ years of technical leadership shipping systems at scale — exabyte video infrastructure at Meta, a 40k RPS open-source GraphQL gateway, a $5M/yr platform rebuilt solo in Go. I ship high-performance systems at LLM-driven velocity, and the guardrails, review infrastructure, and self-steering codebases that keep multi-agent development from collapsing under its own speed.

206.409.8672carl@etaylor.meSeattleGitHubLinkedIn

Experience

IodeSystems LLC

Dec 2022 – Present

Founder & Principal Engineer

  • Rebuilt the $5M/yr Redline fundraising platform in Go to full feature parity, retiring the Kotlin/Spring stack — cold start 7s→0.3s (~22×), end-to-end tests 30m→2m (~15×), serving-process memory ~820MB→~110MB (~7×)
  • Beat Apollo Router by 4× on GraphQL throughput (40k RPS at p99 14ms) with gwag, an open-source Go schema gateway — the executor retrofit alone landed ~20× on wide queries, 94% fewer allocations, 97% less garbage
  • Migrating the Veliode multi-tenant SaaS to Go — core infra live in staging (DB, auth/RBAC, multi-tenant routing; ~35% of the ~270-endpoint surface ported), on self-built homelab-horizon (hz) infrastructure: a single-binary edge gateway with zero-downtime blue-green deploys
  • Cut LLM prompt-context cost 95% with tshell — one eval interface replacing 20+ MCP tools (published to Maven Central)
  • Stopped LLM sessions from silently deleting tests and disabling validation with clown-check, a second-session pre-commit reviewer that flags what the authoring agent rationalized away
  • Shipped the King County assessor analysis platform (kc.iodesystems.com) — interactive MapLibre/Protomaps mapping over PostgreSQL analytics, with valuation-compliance methodology rigorous enough to stand up to appeal
  • Cut client AWS spend 75% (~$8k → ~$2k/mo) with a self-serve provisioning portal

Meta

Mar 2020 – Nov 2022

Sr. Software Engineer (E5), IC — Multi-Team

  • Invented and shipped a patented video lifecycle system reclaiming 1.5+ exabytes of storage while minimizing user impact
  • Built distributed diagnostics and storage accounting/analytics spanning 800B+ videos
  • Self-directed IC across multiple teams — scoped, sold, and led cross-team video infrastructure initiatives end to end
  • Cut OnCall ticket volume 50% with a diagnostic triage system
  • Refactored high-traffic config system saving $1M annually

Fulcrum Technologies

Sep 2012 – Mar 2020

Principal Engineer → Dev Lead (team of 8)

  • Led team of 8 developers, established company-wide code reviews and testing standards
  • Ported a legacy Windows CE mobile app to native Android, then React Native
  • Upgraded Spring2/Ant/Flex to Spring Boot with Vue.js
  • Built ActionScript to JavaScript transpiler with async tree transformations

Pierson Labs

Jan 2012 – Jul 2012

Data Platform Lead (Solo Engineer)

  • Built relational type system in Scala for HBase on Hadoop as sole engineer

Anteambulo

Jul 2009 – Aug 2011

Project Lead (team of 2)

  • Created open-source Selenium tool improving performance by 10x
  • Built PostGIS affiliate ad system with LivingSocial/GroupOn integration
  • Deployed BlueBox PBX for call-center operations

DomainTools

May 2005 – Aug 2009

Sr. Developer → Lead (Web Services, Full Stack + DB)

  • Shipped live auction system generating $12M revenue
  • Orchestrated audit/refactor of 500k+ lines of PHP code
  • Reduced page load times by 72% through SEO and caching optimizations

Skills

Languages
GoKotlinJavaTypeScriptJavaScriptSQLPHPHack
Frameworks & Tools
ReactNext.jsgRPCGraphQLsqlchumaNATSSpringGradleANTLR
AI & Agents
Claude APIMCPMulti-Agent OrchestrationLocal LLMsPrompt/Tool Schema OptimizationSession ManagementLLM Security
Databases
MySQLOraclePostgreSQLRedisDynamoDBNeo4j
Big Data
SparkHBaseHadoopGremlinTinkerPop
Testing & Perf
PlaywrightJUnitSeleniumpprofbenchstatgo test -race
Methods
Spec-Driven DevelopmentArtifact-Based ReviewStaging-as-ReviewLLM Velocity ManagementLeanKanban

Open Source

gwagProtocol-agnostic Go schema gateway — ingest gRPC/OpenAPI/GraphQL, emit all three as typed clients; 4× Apollo Router GraphQL throughput
homelab-horizonSingle-binary homelab infrastructure — WireGuard VPN, split-horizon DNS, edge proxy, zero-downtime blue-green deploys
sqlc-go-codegen-metaquerysqlc fork making static queries runtime-composable — typed filters, ordering, pagination as CTEs with compile-time SQL validation
tshellSandboxed JS-syntax computation framework for LLMs — one eval tool replacing 20+ MCP tools
kotlinx-htmxZero-dependency streaming HTML DSL for Kotlin with HTMX, ChartJS, and Spring integrations
datasetType-safe query builder converting freeform user queries to JOOQ SQL via ANTLR4 grammar

Patent

Systems and Methods for Optimizing a Video Storage Footprint While Minimizing User Impact
#20230136641

Motivations

ImpactMeaningful work benefiting large populations
Root CauseProactive problem-solving from code to organizational incentives
Data DrivenMeasure progress before declaring completion
Big PictureBalance daily operations with strategic contributions