Daniel C. Richardson

Staff Applied AI & Platform Engineer

Portland, OR | dan@freepdx.com | 503-970-9733 | freepdx.com | linkedin.com/in/dancrichardson

Summary

Staff Applied AI & Platform Engineer and technical lead with decades of engineering and production software experience across manufacturing, aerospace, logistics, wearables, and clinical diagnostics. Since January 2026, I have shipped an iPhone app, a borrower web app, edge backends, .NET services, and cross-platform tooling. Best fit: Staff IC roles helping regulated or operational teams modernize platforms and adopt applied AI without giving up reliability, auditability, or engineering control.

Technical Skills

AI, agentic development, and ML LLM orchestration, AI agents, agentic workflows, prompt engineering, RAG, cost-aware model selection, spec-driven generation, evaluation and review discipline, AI system design under HIPAA constraints, Claude and OpenAI APIs.

Languages C#/.NET, SQL, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript. Shipped agent-assisted, where I architect, direct, review, and debug all of it: Swift, Kotlin, C++, Go, PHP.

Platforms and data .NET native AOT, React, Astro, Node, WPF/XAML, Xamarin, QT/QML, Cloudflare Workers, Azure, microservices, GitHub Actions, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Snowflake, Redis, Entity Framework, Power BI, Tableau.

Leadership and regulated environments Technical leadership, mentoring developers, code review, managing contractors, defining SDLC practices, stakeholder discovery, legacy modernization. HIPAA healthcare, FDA medical devices, FAA and ITAR aviation.

Professional Experience

Principal Engineer | Throughline Tech, LLC

January 2026 - Present

Independent software practice. Applied AI, agentic development, and delivery.

Designed and shipped a suite of production software independently, using AI coding agents as implementation tools while owning architecture, implementation decisions, review, debugging, validation, and release.
Built Latticeflow, a .NET native AOT CLI that moves workflow policy out of AI prompts. Deterministic gates verify pass/fail, so LLM over-confidence is eliminated. Used 12.9x less billed input in one matched historical case.
Analyzed token cost against model choice and prompt structure to keep agentic systems cheap and reliable in production.
Built a peer-to-peer lending product across native iOS, native Android, and web. All three clients use the same versioned API; the mobile apps add on-device AI for camera-based cataloging. The iPhone app, borrower web app, and backend are live; Android is built and working through the Play Store release process.

Technical Lead - Systems Modernization | ZRT Laboratory

February 2025 - January 2026

Clinical diagnostics laboratory. HIPAA-regulated.

Built an internal research data-preparation tool that generated SQL queries and shaped results for direct ingestion into the existing processing pipeline, replacing manual data disaggregation. Researchers described the reduction in preparation time as “weeks to days.”
Designed and prototyped an AI-assisted clinical-document intake flow under HIPAA constraints, using image classification, OCR, and LLM extraction. Produced a bounded rollout plan that was materially shorter than the broader replacement alternative; the modernization program ended before production launch.

Senior Software Engineer - Technical Lead | LiquidWire

March 2023 - September 2024

Wearable technology. Early-stage hardware startup.

Architected and wrote the core C#/.NET software for Bluetooth cloud-connected clothing, owning communication and system integration.
Owned a high-risk VR product initiative at a company of fewer than 20 people: set strategy, mapped dependencies, identified the critical path, and directed two contractors. Shipped on time with the stretch goals intact, in an environment where requirements shifted daily.

Senior Software Engineer | OIA Global

June 2021 - March 2023

Global logistics and freight forwarding.

Modernized legacy .NET logistics software for a post-Covid supply chain at a $1.3B freight forwarder with 60+ offices across 30+ countries, on an IT organization of five engineers, one QA, and one product owner.
Implementation engineer on the company-wide Workday cutover, and built the systems moving data reliably between accounting, billing, and shipping.

Senior Software Engineer | Datto

October 2019 - January 2021

Backup, disaster recovery, and security.

Built bare-metal restore and ransomware-protection backup on a 12-engineer team inside Datto’s BCDR division. A ransomware-hit machine went from dead to working in minutes, when instant virtualization was still uncommon in small business.
Designed a system to apply security updates without disrupting active user operations, and ran down a long tail of esoteric defects across appliance hardware revisions under the heavy peer review disaster-recovery software demands.

Senior Software Engineer - Team Lead | Revelar

September 2016 - June 2019

Medical device diagnostics. FDA-regulated.

First software engineer on a breath-based diagnostic instrument measuring exhaled aldehydes as a marker of oxidative stress. Built the software function from nothing and led a team of four across fluidics control, the instrument OS, and the web client.
Architected the device-to-web seam: how an instrument in a clinic identifies itself, submits results, and keeps calibration state in sync. Carried the product from prototype to pre-production.
Mentored through pairing and code review while coordinating electrical engineering, manufacturing, chemistry, firmware, and hardware. Kept software work aligned across those disciplines under an FDA regulatory posture.

Senior Software Engineer | Jeppesen

August 2014 - September 2016

Commercial aviation. FAA and ITAR regulated.

Designed and developed C#/.NET flight routing software compliant with air traffic control regulations under FAA and ITAR constraints. Jeppesen was a Boeing subsidiary throughout my tenure.
Paired with the product owner on “Route Snippets,” letting routers assemble a flight from reusable partial routes.

Software Engineer | 4-Tell

2012 - 2014

Ecommerce personalization and recommendations.

Early engineer at a Portland ecommerce personalization startup serving retailers including Columbia Sportswear and SmartPak, later acquired by SearchSpring. Built the email recommendation path and the deliverability work that kept it out of spam filters.

Software Engineer | HydroLogics

2008 - 2012

Water resource management for public utilities.

Decision-support system for New York City’s drinking water: 19 reservoirs and three controlled lakes across a 2,000-square-mile watershed serving nine million people, built with scientists and government stakeholders. Later acquired by Hazen & Sawyer.

EHS - Manufacturing and QA Engineer | Hewlett-Packard

1995 - 2005

Consumer printer design and global manufacturing.

HP DeskJet design and manufacturing, Voice of Customer. Led ergonomics and EHS programs across four international sites (Vancouver WA, Barcelona, Singapore, Mexico): assessed injury risk station by station and redesigned workstations.

Education

Master of Engineering, Civil Engineering, Portland State University
Graduate coursework, Industrial Engineering (Human Factors), Penn State University
Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology

Selected Work

Write-ups and live links at freepdx.com. Source at github.com/danrichardson.

Latticeflow - deterministic .NET native AOT orchestration for Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and Copilot, with explicit gates and bounded rework.
Rejog Stash - native iOS, native Android, and web clients backed by the same versioned API. Swift, Kotlin, Cloudflare.
TradeTrack2 - investment-portfolio analysis, brokerage imports, financial correctness, and launch infrastructure. .NET, Postgres.
Johnny Solarseed - solar education, energy-rate tooling, and 2 HACS integrations. Python, Home Assistant.
Secure Bike Parking - public risk-scored parking map and moderation portal. Cloudflare Workers.