I’m Tolic

Systems thinking is my default mode. I don’t just use systems, I optimise them, then build new ones.

That instinct built a career. 20+ years shipping production SaaS at scale. An MSc in Applied Mathematics. Observability infrastructure, database migrations, distributed systems across three continents. Melbourne now.

Currently focused on agentic AI and platform architecture: RAG pipelines (LlamaIndex + pgvector), MCP-native tooling, workflow orchestration, and end-to-end production ML (XGBoost, BERT, full MLOps lifecycle on AWS). Strong across Python, Ruby, and TypeScript — early Node and TS adopter — and comfortable across the full stack from messy raw data to deployed model in production. Track record of leading distributed teams through complex delivery in regulated, multi-tenant environments.

Writing about what AI-native software actually looks like.

Currently Building

Promin Dev Code loses its why over time. Requirements rot. Tests outlive their intent. Nobody remembers which constraint forced that weird workaround. Promin is a knowledge graph that reconnects requirements, code, tests, and analytics. A living map of intent, for engineers and AI agents both. Built on the Claude API (application programming interface), the Claude Agent SDK (software development kit), KuzuDB, and Elixir/OTP.

Evolvr CommOps for SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and solo traders. Automates email triage, response drafting, invoice validation, and reporting, so a small business never pulls a second shift just to clear the inbox. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) knowledge base. Human-in-the-loop approval gates. A PII (personally identifiable information) substitution layer keeps client data out of LLM (large language model) context.

For Fun

One-night projects. Built fast, just to see what sticks.

Beat Lab Rhythm anatomy of electronic music. Program drum patterns right in the browser. Tweak tempo, swing, and genre-specific grooves. Audio synthesized live with the Web Audio API (application programming interface). Shows how each genre gets its feel.

Stat Lab Statistics from first principles. No prior math needed. Everything is interactive, poke at it. Concepts you manipulate instead of read.

Writing

Posts that define my professional vision:

Career Highlights

Midnite (Staff Engineer, Platform, 2025 to now). Overhauled secrets management and observability across AWS (Amazon Web Services) ECS (Elastic Container Service). Migrated feature flags to Statsig. Refactored monitoring to a Datadog sidecar architecture.

StackAdapt (Staff Engineer and Team Lead, 2024 to 2025). Led an 8-person distributed team. Built the observability infrastructure that cut mean time to repair by 67%. Architected the GraphQL gateway that cut API (application programming interface) response times by 40%.

Culture Amp (Senior Engineer, 2023). Migrated 3M+ users from MongoDB to PostgreSQL with zero downtime. CQRS (command query responsibility segregation), Strangler Fig, feature flags. AWS (Amazon Web Services) costs dropped 30%.

Seek (Senior Engineer, 2018 to 2021). Multi-region platform serving 2M+ users. Monolith-to-microservices migration via EventBridge and Lambda. Built ML (machine learning) spam detection running at 95% accuracy across millions of daily classifications.

Instacart (Senior Engineer, 2023 to 2024). Led the Ruby/Rails integration platform serving 20+ enterprise retail partners. Cut partner onboarding from weeks to days.

Ferocia / Bendigo Bank (Senior Engineer, 2022 to 2023). Built PayTo integration, Term Deposits, and real-time notifications for 400K+ active banking users.

Earlier (2004 to 2017). Sony Mobile serverless platform. Hero Gaming, 4 white-label casino platforms. SoftServe technical lead (Nissan, BMC). 15+ freelance SaaS (software as a service) builds.

Connect

Building with AI agents? Thinking about AI-native architecture? I like comparing notes.

#ABOUT #CAREER #SOFTWARE-ARCHITECTURE #AI
Share on Bluesky