Joe Swanson — Software Consulting

One engineer.
Full ownership.
Software that ships.

Engineering teams bring me in when they need someone to own a hard problem — not coordinate it. I embed directly, take accountability for outcomes, and ship. AI tooling, platform infrastructure, SRE.

02

Site Reliability Engineering

SLI/SLO definition, observability pipelines, incident runbooks, and reliability standards for platforms that can't afford downtime. CI/CD, containerized deployments, and IaC built to be owned by your team.

Kubernetes Terraform AWS GCP Datadog Grafana ArgoCD

03

Platform & Developer Experience

Internal developer platforms, self-service infrastructure, and Golden Path templates that let teams ship without waiting on ops. Backstage, automated onboarding, and the tooling that collapses the gap between code and production.

Backstage Go TypeScript Self-service IaC GitHub Actions

04

Automation & Integration

SaaS API integrations, event-driven orchestration, identity and access automation — and custom microservices when off-the-shelf tools don't cut it. Built in Go or Python to be fast, testable, and maintainable.

REST APIs OAuth 2.0 SAML Go Python Serverless

You work with me.
No account managers.
No hand-offs.

I'm Joe Swanson — a staff software engineer based in Bozeman, Montana. When you hire me, I'm the one doing the work. Every engagement is scoped honestly — if something isn't the right fit, I'll tell you.

I've been embedded across small teams, funded startups, and larger engineering orgs. I take ownership of outcomes, not just tasks — and I'm available for contract engagements on a project or retainer basis.

15 years of infrastructure and platform work, including a decade of production on-call responsibility. Hands-on agentic AI engineering in production — not just evaluating tools. MCP integrations, CI coding agents, and AI tooling rollouts at the org level.

AI & Platform Engineering — Enterprise SaaS

DevX Agent — AI-Powered Engineering Platform

Built a centralized Slack-based AI agent integrating six internal platforms via Model Context Protocol — GitLab, Atlassian, Grafana, Backstage, Datadog, and EKS. Engineers query infrastructure state, trigger workflows, and get real-time insights through a natural language interface. Also engineered CI/CD coding agents that perform automated code review and quality gating on every merge request, and led the company-wide transition from GitHub Copilot to Cursor and Claude Code.

6 platforms
Integrated via MCP into a single natural language interface
Day one
New services ship with CI/CD, tests, and monitoring via Golden Path templates
Org-wide
AI tooling transition owned end-to-end — rollout, security audit, observability

AI Engineering — Enterprise SaaS

Agentic Documentation Pipeline

Built a two-stage AI documentation system that operates across the full development lifecycle. At the pull request level, the agent analyzes code changes and surfaces targeted doc update suggestions inline. At release tags, a holistic review job runs, generates updated agentic-ready documentation, and opens a PR for a single human reviewer — eliminating manual doc maintenance without removing oversight.

Two-stage
PR-level suggestions plus tag-triggered holistic review
Always current
Agentic-ready documentation kept in sync with every release
Minimal HITL
Human reviews and approves — the agent writes

Backend & Infrastructure Engineering — Venture-Backed Healthcare Startup

Founding Platform Infrastructure

One of five engineers on the founding technical team building a healthcare AI platform from the ground up. Designed and implemented Go microservices for core platform functionality, authored GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines, and consolidated database migrations into a unified, maintainable schema strategy.

Founding team
One of five engineers on the initial platform buildout
Go microservices
Core platform services designed and shipped for production
Zero to prod
CI/CD pipelines and schema strategy built from scratch

Personal Projects

Live — GCP Cloud Run

chomptron.com

AI-powered recipe generator built on Google Gemini. Serverless on Cloud Run — scales to zero, deploys via Cloud Build CI/CD. Caching, retry logic, and health endpoints built in.

chomptron.com →

Live — Next.js / Firebase

wrenchtron.com

Fleet maintenance tracker with Firestore, Firebase Auth, and Cloud Storage. Full PWA with offline support. No server — Firestore security rules handle all access control. Demo available, no login required.

wrenchtron.com/demo →

Live — DigitalOcean / React

tronswan.com

Personal platform hub integrating Spotify, weather, MLB stats, a Hugo blog, and a Google Docs-backed resume. 93%+ test coverage with Vitest and Playwright. 457 commits of active development.

tronswan.com →

Let's talk about
what you're building.

Whether you need AI tooling built into your engineering workflow, an SRE embedded with your platform team, or a second opinion on an architecture decision — reach out and I'll figure out if there's a fit.

Get in touch
Location
Bozeman, Montana — Remote Available
Response time
Within one business day