Devlin Vining

AI-Native Senior Software Architect

One-person engineering team. AI-native. Comfortable in any layer of the stack.

AI-native senior software architect with 15+ years across full-stack web, mobile, and DevOps. Operating as a one-person engineering team with Claude Code as a daily collaborator, I ship at roughly 100x solo-human pace — currently building and operating, in parallel, a self-hosted K3s cluster with full GitOps and observability stack, a multi-tenant agentic chat platform, a real-time persistent Blazor MMO, a fleet of Model Context Protocol servers, and a product intelligence platform on top of the CJ Dropshipping API. Equally comfortable at the application, container, kernel, or database layer.

Experience

New Life Recovery Centers · Chemical Dependency Technician

San Jose, CA

2026-01 – present

Direct-care role in residential substance use disorder treatment, supporting clients through early recovery.

  • Provide direct care and daily support to clients in residential treatment.
  • Document client interactions and behavioral observations in accordance with compliance requirements.

Tether Studios · Software Engineer

Henderson, NV (Remote)

2019-10 – 2023-10

  • Architected and maintained a cross-platform build script in Apache Groovy on Jenkins, automating the delivery pipeline for 40+ titles to Apple App Store, Google Play, and Samsung Galaxy Store.
  • Built and deployed the company's web presence (tetherstudios.com) on October CMS and PHP, owning the full lifecycle from server configuration to frontend.
  • Secured remote operations by deploying and managing VPN solutions for Amazon Web Services across multiple availability zones.
  • Integrated performance-based marketing SDKs (Facebook, IronSource, AppLovin) in collaboration with marketing, contributing to user-acquisition strategies for a portfolio with millions of downloads.
  • Administered Google Workspace and internal tooling for a 20-person remote team — sole point of contact for technical onboarding and troubleshooting.
Groovy Jenkins AWS PHP October CMS Android iOS

Hacienda Otres Village · Operations Manager (Front of House)

Sihanoukville, Cambodia

2016-12 – 2018-12

  • Managed daily operations for a high-volume hospitality venue, coordinating workflows between kitchen, housekeeping, and service staff in Khmer.
  • Oversaw reservations and guest relations for a diverse international clientele, resolving conflicts and ensuring high-quality service delivery.

Chirpme Inc. · Software Engineer

Palo Alto, CA

2012-11 – 2013-07

  • Led full-stack web development for an international social networking application on a LAMP stack.
  • Specialized in Linux systems administration and MySQL database optimization to handle increasing user-data loads.
  • Owned release management, quality control, monitoring, and DevOps processes — significantly reducing downtime and deployment errors.
PHP MySQL Linux LAMP DevOps

Zynga, Inc. · Software Engineer

San Francisco, CA

2009-09 – 2013-03

  • Developed social game features within a high-traffic LAMP stack environment (PHP, JavaScript, MySQL) for major titles including Mafia Wars and CityVille.
  • Shipped the CityVille Downtown expansion and Mafia Wars / FarmVille cross-promotion features in collaboration with cross-functional teams.
  • Conducted rigorous testing and debugging within a massive codebase, ensuring high availability and performance at 1–18 million DAU.
PHP ActionScript JavaScript MySQL LAMP

Sony Computer Entertainment America · Lead Quality Assurance Analyst

Foster City, CA

2007-08 – 2009-09

  • Developed and coordinated software test plans for third-party titles on PlayStation 3 and PSP, ensuring compliance with strict technical-requirement checklists.
  • Specialized in network functionality testing for online multiplayer titles, identifying critical connectivity issues prior to release.
PS3 PSP QA Network Testing

Selected Projects

QuitTrack

Your pocket-sized quit coach.

A full-featured smoking-cessation PWA with craving log, mindful breathing helper, savings tracker, and motivational notifications. Progress timeline supports four quit methods (cold turkey, NRT, MAT, tapering) and ships with seven selectable themes that mirror the look of common cigarette packs — so opening the app feels like reaching for the pack you used to reach for.

.NET PWA Web Push EF Core PostgreSQL

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cluster-management

Helmfile-driven GitOps for a self-hosted K3s cluster.

A complete GitOps stack for a single-node K3s cluster hosting a dozen services across observability, infrastructure, and applications. Every change ships via git → CI → helmfile sync; per-MR review environments spin up automatically and scale to zero via KEDA. Manages Prometheus + Grafana + Loki + Tempo for observability, Velero for offsite backups to DigitalOcean Spaces, Matrix + Synapse for federated chat, Zot as a pull-through registry cache, and the rest of the homelab.

Case studies: Setting up a K8s Homelab · The Quest for the Registry Mirror · Operation Cluster Restore · The Ballast Exchange.

Kubernetes K3s Helm Helmfile GitOps KEDA Velero Prometheus Grafana

AI Platform

Multi-tenant agentic chat platform with bring-your-own-tools.

A self-hosted platform for designing and running AI agents. Wizards let operators compose agents from reusable personas and prompt tasks, attach OpenAPI specs as runtime callable tools, and define multi-agent workflow topologies. Built on Blazor Server + MVC + EF Core with Postgres FTS for search, Microsoft.Extensions.AI for tool dispatch, and a hardened SSRF + NetworkPolicy posture so user-defined tools can't reach private cluster services.

Live URL lands on the login screen — happy to provide credentials on request. Case studies: Semantic Tool Search for Small Language Models · The Protocol Protocol.

.NET 10 Blazor Server EF Core MCP OpenAPI Postgres FTS Kubernetes

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Translation Service

Self-healing localization microservice with auto-propagation.

A standalone translation service that powers multi-language UI across every app in my cluster. When a key is missing in a non-default locale, it falls back to source while flagging the gap; when a new key appears in source, it propagates to every locale. Includes a public API (key-gated), an admin dashboard, an MCP server interface for AI-driven translation curation, and bulk pre-warming endpoints to keep consumer cold-start latency low.

Live URL lands on the login screen. Case study: The Name of the Thing.

.NET 10 Blazor Server EF Core MCP REST API i18n

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Residential

Real-time persistent Blazor MMO — set in the recovery industry.

A multiplayer dashboard tycoon where players run chemical-dependency treatment facilities. Built on Blazor Server with a deliberate Enterprise-CRM aesthetic — patient intake, case files, facility tours, staff scheduling, and live leaderboards all rendered as a working CRM rather than a game UI. Informed directly by my current day-job as a Chemical Dependency Technician.

Blazor Server .NET 10 EF Core Postgres jsonb Real-time Game design

cluster-observability

OpenTelemetry-native observability package for ASP.NET Core.

Published NuGet package (Surfshack.Cluster.Observability) providing drop-in OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs for ASP.NET Core apps. Includes auto page-view tracking, sliding-window active-user metrics, bot-vs-human classification with Accept-Language and Sec-Fetch-* header heuristics plus per-IP rate limiting, and 43 unit tests covering edge cases. Used by four apps in my cluster today.

.NET OpenTelemetry Prometheus NuGet ASP.NET Core

Visit

devlin.vining.club

This site.

ASP.NET Core MVC personal site with runtime theme switching, a markdown-sourced blog, multiplayer Pong over WebSockets, an Ollama-backed AI quote generator running on the cluster, and the YAML-sourced resume page you're reading. Auto-deploys to staging on each push, manually gated to production.

Case studies: The Ghost in the Machine · The Aesthetics Racket · The People's Palette.

.NET 10 MVC Razor WebSockets Ollama GitOps i18n

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