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SHEET 02 · BIOGRAPHY

Two careers,
one instinct.

I'm Travis Carter, a Software Architect who learned the same thing twice: understand what the structure has to carry before you draw the details.

I spent a decade in civil engineering, drafting plans for golf courses, shopping complexes, and the Palm Islands in Dubai. When the 2008 recession ended that career, I taught myself to code and built another one.

What civil engineering gave me is an instinct for load-bearing design. That has shaped everything since: systems built around their failure modes, architectures where the root cause is obvious at 3 AM, clear boundaries that hold up when the load changes.

§ CAREER LOAD PATH
1998 2002 2006 2010 2014 2018 2022 2026
Civil Eng
DRAFTSMAN / DESIGNER
1998–2009
Frontend Dev
JS / SPA WORK
2011–2014
Banjo
SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER
2014–2020
Globality
SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER
2020–2021
PHC
DIRECTOR OF PLATFORM ENGINEERING
2021–2024
ECFX
SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER
2023–Now
§ DETAILED HISTORY

ECFX

SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER Oct 2023 – Present

Sole owner of DevOps and infrastructure on an engineering team that has never been larger than nine, and sole driver of the modernization program.

Platform architecture

  • Architected a config-driven DAG platform for document processing: a Micronaut orchestrator and generic workers over RabbitMQ, a standalone JWT auth service, and a Vue operator dashboard.
  • Its ten generic stages are built to replace 535 legacy processor files. The first source pattern runs end-to-end on the dev environment, ahead of any production traffic.

Pipeline platform

Modernization

  • Drove a 13,047-commit monolith with no test suite from Micronaut 1 to 4 and Java 11 to 17, without a freeze.
  • Took it on to Micronaut 5 and Java 25 in one coordinated jump that took days to walk back to green.
  • Extracted a schema-first library of 75 JPA entities and a gRPC bridge: one data seam of a strangler decomposition that is not finished yet.

Modernization Strangler decomposition

Security

  • Designed an OAuth 2.1 authorization server core and its fail-closed SAML replay guard in Postgres, merged with the auth suite at 494 of 494.
  • Built the gated AWS KMS key migration that closed with all 207 production keys verified on the new CMK.
  • Built a tenant-scoped MCP server with twelve dashboard tools behind OAuth 2.1; it runs on staging, not yet in production.

OAuth + SAML replay guard KMS migration MCP server

AI engineering

  • Own the team-adopted Claude Code platform: 47 skills and 19 agents around a closed-loop, budgeted TDD memory.
  • Presented my AI-assisted workflow to engineering leadership.

AI engineering platform From copy-paste to context engineering

Infrastructure

  • Upgraded three EKS clusters and Karpenter, solo, with roughly five minutes of total logged downtime.
  • Cut median master CI time about 65%, from 38 minutes to 11, across two changes: self-hosted runners, then parallel per-app JIB builds with path-based change detection.
  • Moved 21 click-ops Grafana dashboards into Terraform in 24 days.

EKS upgrades CI/CD Grafana as code

PHC

DIRECTOR OF PLATFORM ENGINEERING Oct 2021 – Mar 2024

Led 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.

Globality

SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER Oct 2020 – Oct 2021

Implemented Kubernetes cluster architecture and deployed vCluster (Loft) to give the engineering team sandboxed development environments, improving developer workflow across a 20-person engineering org.

Banjo

SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER Aug 2014 – Aug 2020

Six 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

JS / SPA WORK Nov 2011 – Aug 2014

Early 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 & PROJECT DESIGNER 1998 – 2009

Over 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.

§ MATERIAL SPEC
LANGUAGES
  • Java
  • Groovy
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • Ruby
FRAMEWORKS
  • Micronaut
  • Hibernate / JPA
  • Spock
  • Vue
  • React
  • Astro
MESSAGING
  • Apache Flink
  • Apache Kafka
  • RabbitMQ
  • gRPC
  • Protobuf
DATA & SECURITY
  • PostgreSQL
  • Elasticsearch
  • OAuth 2.1 / JWT
  • SAML
  • AWS KMS
INFRA & DELIVERY
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes / EKS
  • Karpenter
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • GitLab CI
  • Gradle / JIB
PRACTICES & AI
  • TDD
  • Context Engineering
  • Claude Code
  • MCP
  • Observability as Code
  • Grafana / Prometheus

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.

What I'm Building

I am particularly drawn to problems at the boundaries between systems: event-driven architectures, streaming pipelines, and the tooling that makes engineering teams productive.

EventHorizon is my side project: a personal anomaly-detection platform on Flink and Kafka, born from building the same kind of system three times at two companies. It runs end-to-end on a local Minikube cluster and has not had a real scale test yet. AgentFlow is a concept, with no product code yet: a shared, persistent context layer that any agent or model can read and write, behind a fail-closed MCP boundary.

I also maintain open-source Java tooling, including ProtoFaker, a Protocol Buffer test-data library published on Maven Central: reusable abstractions that help other developers move faster without solving the same problems twice. The projects page has the full list.