# Kevin G. Henderson **Staff Software Engineer — Full-Stack TypeScript · AI Agents & Workflow Platforms** Charlotte, NC · Remote (US) only · kevhender@gmail.com · https://kevhender.net · https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevhender · https://github.com/kevhender ## 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 ### 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. ### 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. **Positions** - Senior Staff Engineer (Jan 2024 – Sep 2024) - Staff Engineer (Jan 2023 – Jan 2024) - Senior UX Engineer (Jan 2022 – Jan 2023) **Highlights** - 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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** (https://thescorecard.net) — 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); minors in Spanish and Business Leadership