Kevin G. Henderson

Summary

Staff-level full-stack engineer with 20+ years of end-to-end product ownership, from 0→1 architecture to production operations. Currently the #1 contributor across the Clearskies AI agent and workflow platform (TypeScript/Vue frontend, Go/Temporal backend): LLM agents with tool calling, MCP, eval-gated prompt changes, human-in-the-loop review, and observability. An early adopter of agentic coding on my team (mid-2025; Claude Code, Cursor). 1,700+ merged PRs and ~1,000 code reviews in two years. Previously Senior Staff Engineer and principal architect of ZenGRC Pro.

Skills

• AI & Agents: LLM agents & tool calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP), LLM evaluation (evals), Context engineering, Structured outputs, Retrieval (RAG), Human-in-the-loop systems, Claude Agent SDK, Anthropic, OpenAI & Gemini SDKs, Vercel AI SDK, LLM tracing & observability, Braintrust
• AI-native development: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, agentic coding workflows, CLAUDE.md / agent skills & tooling
• Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, SQL, Python (productive, AI-assisted), Kotlin (AI-assisted)
• Frontend: React, Vue 3, Next.js, Nuxt, Pinia / Pinia Colada, Vue Flow, Tailwind CSS, Material UI, shadcn / Reka UI, Electron, Capacitor
• Backend & Data: Node.js, Go (Gin), Temporal (durable execution), PostgreSQL, Drizzle, GraphQL (Postgraphile, Apollo), REST, Neo4j, Supabase, WebSockets / streaming
• Platform & Ops: Observability (Datadog, Sentry, PostHog), GitHub Actions CI/CD, Docker, AWS, Cloudflare, feature flags (LaunchDarkly)
• Integrations: Salesforce, Slack, Gong, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, Mailgun, Intercom, PagerDuty
• Practices: System design, Design docs / RFCs, Technical leadership, Mentoring via code review, Testing (Vitest, Jest, Playwright), Accessibility
• Prior: Java / Spring / Hibernate, Ruby on Rails, Angular, ExtJS / Sencha

Experience

1. Senior Software Engineer · Scratchpad / Clearskies

   Nov 2024 – Present · Remote

   Full-stack engineer, Clearskies agent & workflow platform · built its frontend from scratch

   #1 contributor to both the Clearskies frontend (Vue 3/TypeScript/Electron) and backend (Go/Temporal/Postgres/MCP): 1,705 merged PRs and ~990 reviews across six repos in two years.

   • Architected and built most of Clearskies Workflows, the product's core automation engine, end to end across a Vue Flow canvas and a Go/Temporal backend — growing it in ~8 months from CRUD to a graph-driven execution engine with 10+ node types, nested/parallel loops, scheduled and CRM-change triggers, dry-run test runs and versioned drafts.
   • Built the natural-language AI Workflow Builder — an LLM agent that generates and edits workflow graphs from chat and Slack — and made it reliable with publish-time validation and self-repair loops, an LLM semantic auditor, and a staged migration to native tool calling routed through the MCP server; then led its retirement (−28.5k lines) in favor of a headless builder running inside customers' own Claude and ChatGPT.
   • Stood up LLM evaluation for the builder agent — from a Braintrust harness to an in-house framework with structural scorers, an LLM user-simulator for multi-turn disambiguation and a run-comparison UI — and gated prompt and tool changes on it.
   • Wrote the spec for and led Human Review: agent actions that touch Salesforce, Slack or email pause durably on Temporal until a named reviewer approves them, with reviewer notifications and production monitoring — ~70 PRs across frontend and backend in five weeks.
   • Led technical evaluations of emerging agent approaches, including sandboxed coding agents (Codex, Claude Code), with a focus on credential isolation and least-privilege tokens.
   • Bootstrapped the Clearskies frontend from scratch — chose the stack (Vue 3, Pinia Colada, shadcn/Reka on Tailwind 4, Vitest, pnpm), set team conventions, and wrote the agent tooling and CLAUDE.md guidance the team codes with.

2. Senior Staff Engineer · ZenGRC (Reciprocity → RiskOptics)

   Jan 2022 – Sep 2024 · Remote

   Principal architect, ZenGRC Pro · promoted Senior UX Engineer → Staff → Senior Staff

   Selected within months of joining to architect the next-generation GRC/compliance platform, ZenGRC Pro, and grew it from first commit to a production product built by ~10 engineers.

   • Senior Staff Engineer (Jan 2024 – Sep 2024)
   • Staff Engineer (Jan 2023 – Jan 2024)
   • Senior UX Engineer (Jan 2022 – Jan 2023)

   • Architected and bootstrapped ZenGRC Pro from scratch (Next.js, Material UI, PostgreSQL, Postgraphile/GraphQL) in partnership with the chief architect, then served as principal engineer and reviewer on every PR as the team grew to ~10 engineers.
   • Designed the typed GraphQL data layer — Postgraphile with TypeScript codegen and generated react-query hooks — giving the whole team one consistent, strongly typed API surface.
   • Chose the mature Next.js Pages Router over the then-unstable App Router after memory leaks and slow compiles showed up in an early build, and engineered a migration path so the switch could happen later at low cost.
   • With no designers left at the company, owned UX and visual design: rebuilt the theme with light/dark modes and overhauled layouts across the product.
   • Architected a new external Trust Center product on Next.js 15 / React Server Components for performance and SEO.

3. Senior Platform Engineer · Moovweb → Layer0 → Edgio (Limelight Networks)

   Nov 2015 – Jan 2022 · Remote

   Six years across the platform, developer docs, open-source frameworks and customer console as Moovweb became Layer0 and then Edgio.

   • Core contributor to the Layer0 Console (React/Material UI over a Rails GraphQL API): site-metrics dashboards, mobile-responsive UI, and support flows integrating Intercom, PagerDuty, reCAPTCHA and S3.
   • Co-designed the Layer0 docs app (Next.js) and extended framework support to Next.js, Vue, Nuxt, Angular and Spartacus; improved service-worker prefetching.
   • Key contributor to React Storefront, an open-source eCommerce PWA framework — reusable component library held at 100% Jest coverage.
   • Led MoovCheckout, an injectable React checkout, including an Express MITM dev proxy for developing against live production sites.

4. Senior Engineer · Virtual Instruments (now Virtana)

   Dec 2013 – Oct 2015 · Remote

   Led an MVC re-architecture and multi-version framework upgrades of the VirtualWisdom UI; prototyped its mobile app.

5. Senior Software Contractor · Bank of America

   Mar 2013 – Jan 2014 · Charlotte, NC

   Subject-matter expert for a Risk Technologies UI: framework upgrade, dynamic query builder, mentoring onshore/offshore developers.

6. Technical Lead / Architect · Aym Technologies

   Sep 2011 – Mar 2013 · Charlotte, NC

   Architected and shipped OnTarget Clinical, a multi-tenant SaaS (Spring, Hibernate), from concept to production as tech lead.

7. Senior Software Developer · CompanionCabinet Software (now Breakfront)

   Nov 2008 – Sep 2011 · Charlotte, NC

   Rebuilt a JSF frontend as a high-performance single-page app; led multiple releases.

8. Software Engineer · Solers, Inc.

   2005 – 2008 · Arlington, VA

   Java enterprise systems in the Net-Centric Systems Division: IPT lead, LDAP-based messaging, Lucene search. Earlier: software engineering intern at GE Energy (C#/ASP.NET).

Selected projects

• Scorecard — Real-time multiplayer scorekeeper for 11 card games on web, iOS and Android — built and shipped solo, agent-first with Claude Code (Nuxt 4, Postgres/Drizzle, WebSockets, Capacitor, RevenueCat), with 180 test suites in CI.
• Unofficial Pixel Face — Wear OS watch face plus phone/watch companion apps that mirror live notification icons onto the watch — Kotlin and Watch Face Format, a stack new to me, built entirely agent-first.
• MailTray — macOS menu-bar app unifying Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and iCloud webmail with unread badges and notifications — Electron, Vue 3, SQLite/Drizzle, shipped as a notarized DMG and Mac App Store build.
• kevhender.net — This site: static Astro, generated from one typed profile file, with a grounded "Ask about Kevin" assistant on a Cloudflare Worker.

Education

• Virginia Tech — B.S. Computer Engineering, Dec 2004 (Magna Cum Laude, Honors Scholar)