Elevation Craft

Resume

Andy Beckwith

AI Orchestration and Platform Engineering. Senior Staff Engineer and Technical Lead.

Denver, Colorado

Senior Staff Software Engineer and technical lead with 24 plus years designing, building, and operating large-scale backend and full-stack systems across SaaS, ecommerce, and financial platforms. Currently focused on agentic systems engineering: AI orchestration workflows with custom guardrails, live data integration, and measurable impact on engineering velocity and operational safety. Brings real-world operational leadership experience as a structural and wildland firefighter and EMT, informing disciplined system design in high-risk and mission-critical environments.

Experience

Mar 2023 – Mar 2026

Senior Staff Engineer, Technical Lead · Zendesk

Designed and shipped agentic AI orchestration on the engineering organization, while continuing to lead the team responsible for Zendesk's email ingestion and ticket creation infrastructure at Gmail-class scale.

Ruby · Rails · TypeScript · React · Datadog · PagerDuty · MCP · LLM orchestration

Jan 2021 – Present

Lieutenant, Structural Firefighter, Wildland Firefighter, EMT-IV · Elk Creek Fire Protection District

Volunteer service alongside varied crews and agencies in high-risk emergency environments requiring rapid situational awareness and disciplined execution. The discipline that informs system design also runs the fire ground.

Lieutenant · Structural Firefighter · Wildland Firefighter · EMT-IV

Jul 2018 – Mar 2023

Staff Engineer, Technical Lead · Zendesk

Led backend architecture for ticket ingestion and notification systems and influenced engineering standards across multiple teams.

Ruby · Rails · React · Redux

Oct 2015 – Jul 2018

Senior Software Engineer · Zendesk

Senior contributor on the email infrastructure platform handling inbound and outbound processing at mega scale.

Ruby · Rails · Ember · React · Redux

Feb 2015 – Oct 2015

Web Application Developer, Core UI and Checkout · Best Buy

Built Node.js applications supporting server-side rendering and client experiences in high-traffic ecommerce flows.

Node.js · JavaScript

Feb 2014 – Feb 2015

Architect, Developer APIs and Platform · Best Buy

Architected the external Developer API ecosystem and portal, enabling scalable third-party integrations.

Java · Ruby

Oct 2012 – Feb 2014

Ruby Developer, Integration Engineering · Best Buy

Built a Rails marketplace automation platform integrating Best Buy product APIs with eBay listings, enabling $40M plus annual incremental revenue.

Ruby · Rails · Postgres

Jul 2009 – Dec 2012

Senior Web Developer · Wells Fargo

Led modernization of legacy SOAP and JPF services to RESTful Spring MVC, modernized CI/CD, and grew into a trusted mentor on the team. Selected as Wells Fargo Technology Operations Group Top Performer.

Java · Spring MVC · Backbone.js · Maven · Gradle · CruiseControl

Jan 2007 – Jun 2009

Web Application Developer · Wells Fargo

Built and shipped the internal Wealth Management CRM for Private Banking and the Banker Loan Information System as an integrated companion product.

Java · Spring MVC · Backbone.js · SOAP · REST

Skills

AI and orchestration

  • Agentic systems and LLM orchestration
  • AI workflow integration
  • MCP (Model Context Protocol)
  • Prompt engineering and guardrails
  • Local model experimentation

Infrastructure and systems

  • Distributed systems
  • Backend infrastructure
  • Email and ticketing platforms
  • HTML parsing and classification
  • API architecture
  • Event processing
  • Reliability engineering
  • RAG
  • DAG

Languages and frameworks

  • Ruby
  • Python
  • Go
  • TypeScript
  • Java
  • Node.js
  • React
  • Ember
  • Backbone

Leadership

  • Technical lead
  • System design
  • Mentorship
  • Incident response
  • Cross-team coordination

Education

  • University of Wisconsin, Madison

    Computer Science · AI Concentration

    Neural networks and backpropagation, image recognition, heuristics, fuzzy logic.

  • St. Cloud State University

    Computer Science

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