About
I'm Travis Carter, a Software Architect and Senior Engineer who built two careers the same way: by learning on the job and refusing to stop. I spent a decade in civil engineering before teaching myself to code during the Great Recession, and I have been building distributed systems, streaming platforms, and cloud infrastructure ever since.
What civil engineering gave me that most software engineers never get is an instinct for load-bearing design. Before you choose materials, before you draw the details, you understand what the structure has to carry. That thinking has shaped everything I have built in software: systems designed around their failure modes, architectures where the root cause is obvious at 3 AM, clear boundaries that hold up when the load changes.
83%
Build time reduction
100+
Services migrated, zero downtime
4+
Industries, one streaming engine
Career Journey
Sr. Software Engineer - ECFX
Oct 2023 – PresentFull-stack engineer and platform architect at a law-tech startup. Sole owner of DevOps and infrastructure. Refactored CI/CD pipelines to cut build times from 45 minutes to under 10 with selective build and deploy. Led a Micronaut 4 and Hibernate 6 upgrade across a six-year-old codebase with no existing test coverage, using Claude Code workflows and a TDD-first approach that closed over 50 Jira tickets in two weeks. Presented AI-augmented development methodology to engineering leadership, and have been writing publicly about context engineering and agent-driven development.
Director of Platform Engineering - PHC
Oct 2021 – Mar 2024Led platform engineering at a health-tech Series A startup. Owned architecture, system design, and the development roadmap. Built a real-time risk anomaly detection and notification platform from scratch using Flink, Elasticsearch, Protobufs, and Micronaut. Created a custom Flink StateFun mixed-language framework supporting processors in both Java and Python.
Sr. Software Engineer - Globality
Oct 2020 – Oct 2021Implemented Kubernetes cluster architecture and deployed vCluster (Loft) to give the engineering team sandboxed development environments, improving developer workflow across a 20-person engineering org.
Sr. Software Engineer - Banjo
Aug 2014 – Aug 2020Six formative years at a fast-paced startup building real-time event processing and anomaly detection systems. Built an automation API that cut discovery-to-notification times from 7 minutes to under 30 seconds. Created an inter-agency coordination framework used by law enforcement, fire, and safety agencies. Worked across the full stack in an environment where everyone shared knowledge and owned everything. This is where my conviction around event-driven architecture was built, in production, under pressure, at scale.
Frontend Developer
Nov 2011 – Aug 2014Early software career building JavaScript SPAs and UX. Rewrote an ASP.NET site into a true single-page application using Knockout.js and Durandal.js.
Civil Engineering Draftsman and Project Designer
1998 – 2009Over a decade of plan creation, project design, and engineering approvals. Drafted plans for Big Horn Golf Course in Palm Springs, designed the Blue Diamond shopping complex in Las Vegas, and trained engineers in Dubai on Autodesk Civil 3D for the Palm Islands project. Self-taught AutoCAD before graduating high school. When the 2008 recession hit, I taught myself to code and pivoted to software.
What I Do
Most senior engineers have spent their career in one layer of the stack. I have spent meaningful time in all of them: platform, frontend, data, DevOps, infrastructure. My work spans the full lifecycle of complex systems, from architecture and design through deployment and optimization.
I am particularly drawn to problems at the boundaries between systems: event-driven architectures, streaming pipelines, and the tooling that makes engineering teams productive. That includes the boundary I have been working at most actively over the past year, between human architectural judgment and AI-driven execution. I have built agent workflows, written about context engineering, and put these approaches into production with real results. I am building toward a startup in this space, EventHorizon and AgentFlow, a context-driven agent orchestration engine that has its roots in years of work on event-driven platform design.
Technical Expertise
Languages & Frameworks
Java, Kotlin, TypeScript, Python. Micronaut, Spring Boot, Astro, React.
Data & Streaming
Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Protocol Buffers.
Infrastructure
AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), Terraform, Docker, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions.
Practices
Domain-Driven Design, Event Sourcing, TDD, Observability, Platform Engineering, Context Engineering, AI-Augmented Development.
Open Source
I maintain several open-source libraries on Maven Central, including tools for Protocol Buffer testing, Elasticsearch integrations, and Micronaut extensions. I believe in building reusable, well-tested abstractions that help other developers move faster without having to solve the same problems twice.
Philosophy
I believe the best engineering comes from deeply understanding what a system has to carry before deciding how to build it. I value simplicity, clear boundaries, and architectures that are easy to reason about. When something breaks at 3 AM, the design should make the root cause obvious.
That same instinct applies to how I think about AI-assisted development. The engineers who get the most out of these tools are the ones who already had discipline: good documentation, meaningful tests, clear architectural context. The tools amplify the foundation you give them. If the foundation is weak, they amplify that too.
I have spent a long time believing that doing the work right was worth the investment even when it was slower. The past year has confirmed it. Doing the work right is now the thing that scales.