Brandon Casci

Principal Software Engineer, Applied AI · AI Product Engineer · Rails / Elixir · Founder, prior exit

Somerville, MA - Portland, ME
https://www.brandoncasci.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandoncasci/
brandon.casci@gmail.com
617-233-7597

Summary

I walk into stalled projects and messy codebases and turn them into shipped, revenue-generating SaaS: inside enterprise teams, as a co-founder and CTO who raised $1M, and on my own with an exit. At Bonterra I took an auction product from beta to GA, generating $1M+ and cutting onboarding 75%. Today I build and run 2 live-customer products (Boswell, 1.2M+ household assistances for community organizations, and Harmonic.fm) with AI coding agents governed by rules files, review gates, and evaluation, so nothing generated grades its own homework. Deep in Rails, Elixir, PostgreSQL, and multi-tenant HIPAA-grade architecture, across regulated healthcare, payments, and platforms serving 20K enterprise customers.

Skills

Languages & Frameworks: Ruby, Rails 5-8, Python, Elixir/Phoenix, JavaScript, React, Haml, Stimulus, Minitest Data & Architecture: PostgreSQL, strong SQL, query optimization, Redis, Sidekiq, caching, async / background jobs, performance under load, multi-tenant / per-tenant isolation, HIPAA-grade compliance Infra & Delivery: AWS, Docker, CI/CD, Stripe (Connect), Twilio, Mailgun AI-augmented delivery: multi-agent development workflows, MCP tool surfaces, evaluations (evals), context and rules files, review gates for generated work, LLM tooling integration, prompt and evaluation practices Practices: architecture & code standards, code review, mentoring, turnaround of stalled deliverables

Experience

Principal Engineer, Applied AI & Co-Founder

Apr 2024 - Present | Harmonic.fm & Boswell

• Reacquired and rebuilt Boswell, the case-management platform I co-founded, to 50K+ household assistances a month (1.2M+ to date)
• Built an MCP server into the Rails app, each tool call cleared by its own policy before it dispatches
• Built an evaluator that tunes a skill’s description until it fires when it should, graded against cases the tuning never touched
• Directed AI coding agents under review gates, with a clear line between what runs unattended and what needs my sign-off
• Cut infrastructure cost 75%, tracing a high bill to missing indexes a prior team had worked around with bigger compute
• Designed and built it multi-tenant, with per-tenant data isolation
• Built service-update announcements on Twilio, so each organization on the platform could send its own updates
• Also build and run Harmonic.fm, a Stripe Connect music marketplace with automated payouts and revenue splitting

Contract Software Engineer

Apr 2024 - Jun 2025 | RiseKit

• Consolidated 3 React applications into one Rails 8 platform, feature by feature, without stopping the running system
• Raised test coverage across legacy systems to make the consolidation safe
• Authored migration requirements, technical specifications, and architecture documentation
• Built the AI-assisted development discipline the migration ran on, in 2024, and published it in January 2025
• Wrote the rules file carrying project coding standards and architecture patterns, with prompt templates for code review and test writing

Lead Growth Engineer, Bonterra

Feb 2022 - Aug 2023 | Contract → Senior Engineer → Lead Growth Engineer

• Launched an auction product from beta to GA, generating $1M+ revenue for nonprofit customers
• Drove the transition from Sales-Led to Product-Led Growth, cutting onboarding time 75%
• Upgraded the platform off unsupported Rails and Ruby versions onto current ones
• Established coding standards and code review processes adopted across the department
• Built a multi-channel messaging system (Email/SMS via Twilio) for real-time bidder notifications
• Kept auction paths performant at thousands of requests per minute during live-bidding spikes, with caching, database indexing, and async jobs
• Held delivery discipline on a platform serving 20K enterprise customers

Principal Software Developer, CTO & Co-Founder, bosWell, Inc.

2018 - 2022

• Brought in to rescue grant-funded deliverables after the existing team stalled; performance earned the co-founder and CTO role
• Secured $1M in angel and grant funding across 2 product generations
• Built a HIPAA-compliant platform for community health and social-service organizations
• Built the engineering function from scratch: hiring process, engineering interviews, delivery cadence, and standards

Senior/Contract Software Engineer, Concierge Live

2015 - 2018

• Built features that won and retained Fortune 500 clients (Barclays, AT&T, Citrix), securing recurring contracts of $50K-$150K
• Built an Elixir integration between the ticket platform and Ticketmaster for in-app purchases and mobile ticket transfers
• Resolved performance bottlenecks under load through query optimization and caching
• Passed security audits to close enterprise deals

Contract Software Engineer, Par8o

2014 - 2015

• Built features for a HIPAA-compliant platform enabling secure medical record transfers between providers, maintaining SOC2 compliance

Principal Software Developer & Founder, LoudCity/Loudcaster

2005 - 2014

• Founded and built 2 SaaS products serving 1,000+ online radio broadcasters, generating $25K+ monthly revenue
• Engineered a copyright compliance system processing hundreds of millions of performances a year
• Sustained thousands of requests per minute on the streaming and reporting paths, through caching, indexing and async processing
• Techstars Boston 2010; lobbied Congress successfully for a Small Webcaster Settlement Act extension
• Delivered audio clips on the fly into station broadcast queues by email on Mailgun, for playback between songs
• Built a live streaming platform with audio transcoding, automated provisioning, and real-time stats
• Exited to a competitor in a private transaction

Additional Experience

• T2 Modus (2016-2017) - Stabilized an automotive CRM platform for GA release
• Earlier software engineering roles (1996-2005) - See LinkedIn for details

Recommendations

Brandon is the kind of engineer that is a multiplier. He not only brings a large skill set, and a dedicated work ethic, he also works hard to make the entire team around him better. He has a strong feel for what makes more maintainable code, and can lead others to see his vision. He also pushes and prods to make any solution better. Even the most elegantly implemented solution won’t deliver results if it solves the wrong problem. Having run his own business, he understands the importance of solving the most important problem first.

Thomas Hoen Senior VP of Product Engineering, Bonterra

Brandon is an engineer’s engineer! His technical acumen helped our team write better, product-focused code and his entrepreneurial savvy helped us deliver smarter features, faster. He’s really smart and generous with knowledge. I hope we get another chance to work together!

Mike Subelsky Consulting Software Architect

Brandon and I were paired as the core members of the Growth team at Bonterra, and we worked together for a year on a series of pioneering projects. This was such a lucky break, because in Brandon I had a true partner in finding innovative, out-of-the-box solutions to problems that were all in a completely new area for the company, with no map, and no pre-existing norms to follow. His willingness to look at a challenge with an open mind and find well-designed ways to take pieces apart and put them back together in smart, efficient, and future-proof ways that will help us scale was exactly what we needed in a growth engineer, and his entrepreneurial spirit made for a fantastic team comradery.

Shannon Peavey Principal Product Lead, Bonterra