Long engagements on software that already mattered.

Founding engineer for more than four years at Stoke Inventory Partners, a lender to growers, makers, and consumer brands in regulated markets. The platform runs agents for document intake, financial analysis, underwriting, and risk review inside a gated pipeline, with every figure grounded against the source, an evaluation harness over prompt changes, and a credit officer making the decision. Behind it: a client portal, a back office, investor capital pooled into SPVs, covenants, and a double-entry ledger that stores money as integers. Rob partially owns and has helped build the company, and oversees its technology platforms. It is not a CollectDev client.

A storefront where customers pay in USDC or USDT and receive gift cards and eSIMs by email. Wallet screening with held balances, identity verification, transaction limits under the compliance manual, payment reconciliation, and supplier fulfillment run autonomously on rules with an audit trail. There is no model in the loop, because the decisions are regulatory. Rob owns and operates the company. It is not a CollectDev client.

A CollectDev product for registering, scoring, and paying out amateur golf tournaments, built and run from 2022 to 2024. The software worked. The company was sunset over the absence of a founders' agreement, informal equity that ended in a dispute, and payment processors and regulators treating entry fees and payouts as gaming. The case study is candid about all of it.

The system Rob runs his own work through. A dozen AI assistants, each with one job, read a client's messages and code and get on with it: keep a record of every conversation, work out what needs an answer, look things up, write first drafts, check each other's work, make the code changes, and mark their own work every night. One thing always stays with a person: nothing goes out in anyone's name until that person has approved it, and the system will not send anything that differs from what was approved. Each assistant earns more independence only as its track record on real work holds up, every dollar it spends is counted, and client information goes in but never comes out. Each client gets their own separate copy, and no client is ever named in the code.

A service Rob built in a fixed time budget to show how CollectDev builds an agent pipeline. Upload a PDF or spreadsheet and get a job id at once; a worker extracts the text deterministically, a cheap model classifies it, a stronger model annotates it, and every model output is forced through a schema and re-validated before it is stored. Postgres is the queue. The write-up includes the review passes that found and fixed its own bugs. It is a reference implementation, not a client system.

More than four years of technical leadership and engineering management for a music retail and distribution platform. Rob was responsible for the engineering systems that support the majority of the business, including platform work and AI initiatives. The client is not named here.

More than two years as IT Director for a Chicago marketing firm, supporting the accounts it runs for national brands. Rob put agents to work on the firm's data analytics, data hygiene, and platform development, and on generating direct-mail proofs, so campaign data arrives clean and proofs are produced from it rather than assembled by hand. Neither the firm nor its clients are named here.

Employment in Alberta's energy sector, at TransAlta and at Arcus Power / NRG Stream, an energy market data and analytics company now operating as Arcobi. This is where the background in trading systems, market data, and real-time analytics comes from. These are former employers, not clients.

Rob built agentic platforms for social media marketing and insights for a Fortune Global 500 consumer goods company: multi-agent systems that plan, publish, and read results, with AI integrated into the development workflow itself. He also works on training frontier models for an early-stage, venture-backed AI startup. Neither is named here.