I’m Tolic

I’ve always been more interested in why systems fail than in the features they were supposed to ship.

That instinct built a career — 17 years of production SaaS, an MSc in Applied Mathematics, and a trail of observability infrastructure, database migrations, and distributed systems across three continents. Now I’m in Melbourne, building agentic AI systems with the Claude API and 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, and nobody remembers which constraint forced that weird workaround. Promin is a knowledge graph that reconnects requirements, code, tests, and analytics — giving both engineers and AI agents a living map of intent. Built on Claude API + Claude Agent SDK + KuzuDB + Elixir/OTP.

Evolvr — CommOps for Melbourne property managers. Automates email triage, response drafting, invoice validation, and reporting. RAG-powered knowledge base with human-in-the-loop approval gates and a PII substitution layer that keeps client data out of LLM context.

Writing

Posts that define my professional vision:

• Hybrid vs AI-Native: Why Developers Became Middle Management — In hybrid orgs, developers relay intent between humans and AI. AI-native orgs cut out the relay.
• Code Is a Lossy Format — Source code discards intent. LLMs expose the problem. Graph-based models fix it.
• Beyond the Horseless Carriage — We’re building AI that mimics human workflows. AI-native software should look like a living organism.
• Beyond the Chat Window: UX on Steroids with LLMs — Chat is the laziest AI integration. The real opportunity is components that remember users and act on context.
• Context Engineering: The Skill That Actually Matters — Not prompt engineering. The discipline of deciding what goes into the context window, and why.

Career Highlights

Midnite (Staff Engineer, Platform — 2025-Present): Overhauled secrets management and observability across AWS ECS. Migrated feature flags to Statsig, refactored monitoring to Datadog sidecar architecture.

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

Culture Amp (Senior Engineer — 2023): Migrated 3M+ users from MongoDB to PostgreSQL with zero downtime — CQRS, Strangler Fig, feature flags. AWS costs dropped 30%.

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

Instacart (Senior Engineer — 2023-2024): Led Ruby/Rails integration platform serving 20+ enterprise retail partners. Reduced partner onboarding from weeks to days.

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

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

Connect

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

• LinkedIn: @tolic
• Bluesky: @freerangetolic.com
• GitHub: @kukula
• Email: tolic@freerangetolic.com