Self-taught founding engineer · Three companies founded or co-founded as the only or primary engineer · CTO, President & Director of Verified Fishing, Inc.
Open to remote: Senior / Founding Engineer · Fractional CTO · AI Application Engineer — Full-time or contract · US-hours compatible
Summary
Self-taught founder-engineer. Five years shipping in public — no employer between high school and now, no CS degree, three companies founded or co-founded. Founded Roley solo to paying users; co-founded AGFarms 50/50 with Gianangelo Dichio; spun Verified Fishing, Inc. out of AGFarms as a Delaware C-Corp and am currently raising a $750K F&F SAFE at a $5M post-money cap. Own the whole stack alone: real-time distributed systems, applied CV, on-chain provenance, one-codebase mobile (Expo / RN / Web), and the production Kubernetes under all of it. Build operator-first — the dense control surfaces captains, instructors, and traders actually use, not the marketing chrome around them.
Experience
CTO, President & Director · Verified Fishing, Inc. (DerbyFish · Kala™)Apr 2026 – Present
Delaware C-Corp spun out of AGFarms · co-founder Gianangelo Dichio · derby.fish · kala.fish
- Currently raising a $750K F&F SAFE at a $5M post-money cap; incorporated the Delaware C-Corp and structured the spinout from AGFarms.
- Shipped iOS, Android, and web from a single Expo / React Native / Next.js codebase: live outings, real-time leaderboards, AWS-IVS livestreaming, AI catch verification, on-chain Fish Cards on Flow, Stripe Connect prize payouts — the kind of surface that usually needs a team.
- Designed the BHRV evidence protocol (Bump · Hero · Release · Video) — turns a smartphone catch in the middle of nowhere into a tamper-evident on-chain record. Verification stack pairs AWS Rekognition with Claude Vision against a 419-species classifier.
- Designed the BAIT economy: $1 per Verified Fishing Hour on Stripe Connect rails, structured to support real prize pools without money-transmitter exposure.
- Operate production solo — hand-rolled k3s on Hetzner running every service, host-level Postgres / Dolt / Langfuse. No DevOps hire on the cap table.
Co-founder & Engineering Lead · AGFarms LLCMid 2024 – Present
Venture studio · 50/50 partnership with Gianangelo Dichio · profitable across multiple production properties without outside capital · agfarms.dev
- Nucleus Brain (nucleusbrain.com) — self-hostable autonomous-enterprise platform with native MCP transport, shipped during the first wave of Anthropic's MCP rollout. FastAPI + FastMCP + Claude Agent SDK + Neo4j knowledge graph, with a working DPO fine-tuning pipeline and Promptfoo evals.
- Lead engineer on DerbyFish (above) and on Walleye Fest — Rust / Axum API and Next.js operator dashboards serving a real tournament series.
- Studio properties currently taking real revenue across four distinct verticals: Happy Swims (Miami swim-school booking), Patagonia Moto Rentals (Chile tourism marketplace), AGFPay (crypto payment infra), Polyglott (open-source multilingual learning).
Founder & Sole Engineer · Roley Inc.2023 – 2024
Acting / casting auto-application SaaS · solo-founded, solo-built, reached paying users in production
- Started the company alone and wrote every line: messaging backbone, Backstage and Casting Networks scrapers, auth API, dashboard, Python browser-automation driver. Got it to revenue alone before deciding the market wasn't worth the next round of effort.
Co-operator · Interactive Patagonia SpA2025 – Present
Chilean SpA · tourist transport, motorcycle & e-bike rental, Punta Arenas · built the booking platform and co-run the operation on the ground — bilingual ops and code, in Chilean Spanish, in-country.
Skills
Languages
TypeScript, Python, SQL (PostgreSQL / PostGIS / TimescaleDB), Rust, Go, Solidity, Bash
Frontend
React 19, Next.js 15, React Native (Expo SDK 54), Tailwind v4, Radix, Mapbox GL, D3, Three.js / R3F, TanStack Query, Vitest, Playwright
Backend & data
FastAPI, Express, Axum (Rust); Supabase + Edge Functions + Realtime; WebSockets; dbt medallion pipelines, Dagster; Neo4j; Dolt
AI & ML
Claude Agent SDK · Anthropic / OpenAI SDKs · MCP transport (FastMCP) · AWS Rekognition · AWS IVS · AssemblyAI · DPO training · Langfuse · Promptfoo evals
Web3
Flow (Cadence) · @onflow/fcl · Solidity / Hardhat · x402 · Coinbase embedded wallet · Dynamic Labs · Uniswap V4 SDK · Filecoin
Infra & DevOps
k3s on Hetzner · Docker / Kustomize · GitHub Actions · nginx · Linux · Stripe Connect · Delaware C-Corp governance & SAFE-round mechanics
Education: no formal CS degree — five years shipping in public against primary sources: papers, RFCs, source code, Kerrisk's The Linux Programming Interface (cover-to-cover with exercises and C programs against the syscall surface), and Harvard / MIT / Stanford lectures. Full git trail across mattrickslauer, AGFarms, and Roley-Me available as the verifiable credential. Languages: English (native), Spanish (fluent — lives in Chile), Russian (fluent).