Senior Software Engineer · 15+ years · Available

I ship enterprise software with AI agents.

Currently at SOCi, pioneering agentic development workflows across a SaaS platform serving 50,000+ locations. Previously built systems for Mercedes-Benz Australia, Honda Australia, and Tipple. Looking for Staff or Principal teams that take AI-native engineering seriously.

See selected work Read the thesis
Ash Dawson, Senior Software Engineer

Thesis

AI made coding cheap. It made judgment expensive.

The teams who win the next decade aren't the ones with the most AI tools. They're the ones whose senior engineers learn to orchestrate agents the way they used to mentor juniors — with clear specs, tight feedback loops, and architectural taste.

I've spent the last year proving this isn't theoretical. Not on a side project. Across a SaaS platform serving 50,000 locations, where the cost of getting it wrong is measured in customer churn and on-call pages. The engineers who treat AI like infrastructure — not magic — are the ones shipping.

Read the full essay →

Receipts

40%

faster API responses across 50,000+ locations at SOCi.

Led the perf work that compressed hundreds of milliseconds off the hottest endpoint in the Listings platform — the API that powers location data for every franchised business on SOCi. Built and shipped without a single defect, revert, or hotfix across the last review period.

26 PRs in last 6 months. Zero defects. Zero hotfixes.
22.7k lines of production code shipped. Next teammate: 14k with 3 hotfixes.
33 pages of internal docs written and maintained in 3 weeks.

Past work for: Mercedes-Benz Australia · Honda Australia · SOCi · Tipple

Selected work

2025 · Featured

Agents Platform

13 specialist agents collaborating without destroying each other's work.

Multi-agent orchestration system with isolated workspaces, three-way diff merging, loop detection, budget-aware model downgrade, blind adversarial validation, and 54 structured event types for observability. Built because I watched agents corrupt each other's state and burn $12 in tokens retrying the same failing command. Now they can't.

PythonDockerRabbitMQClaude APIOllamaWebSockets
Read the writeup →
2025 · Open source

SteamForge

Desktop achievement manager for Steam. Single 10MB binary.

Cross-platform desktop app with direct Steamworks SDK integration via purego FFI (no CGo, clean cross-compilation, native binaries for Windows, Linux, and Steam Deck). Concurrent data pipelines for 800+ game libraries. SQLite caching layer for sub-200ms load times.

GoSvelte 5WailspuregoSQLite
Source Download Writeup
SteamForge showing a Steam game library with achievement statistics and completion rates
2025 · Local-first

MeepMeep

Privacy-first voice transcription. Zero network calls. Sub-200ms.

Local-first push-to-talk voice transcription. Whisper.cpp for inference, Silero VAD via ONNX Runtime, PortAudio for capture. Speculative transcription via ring-buffer snapshots hides latency — text appears almost instantly when you release the key, because the work already happened. Anti-cheat safe: uses PostMessage instead of SendInput so games never see the app. Under 1GB RAM, under 5% CPU at idle.

GoWhisper.cppSilero VADONNXPortAudio
Coming soon
2024 · Personal brand

ratkill.gg

Gaming-side dev hub for shipped tools and works-in-progress.

Home for SteamForge and HabitQuest (gamified habit tracker, in progress). Less a portfolio than a place to ship gaming-adjacent things without polluting the professional surface area.

AstroTailwindTypeScript
Visit ratkill.gg →
ratkill.gg mascot — a stylised rat character

Writing

Notes from shipping software with AI agents.

AI Isn't Magic. It's Infrastructure.

Why I stopped throwing prompts at the wall and started engineering with AI like every other system that has a budget, a failure mode, and a quality bar.

An Agent Platform Where Agents Can't Destroy Each Other's Work

Workspace isolation, three-way diff merging, loop detection, blind validation. Every guardrail exists because I watched an agent break something without one.

26 PRs, Zero Bugs. The Boring Truth.

It's not the AI. It's not the framework. It's the discipline around the code. What zero-defect output actually requires when AI writes most of it.

Why I'm Going All-In on AI Agentic Architecture

How AI tools fundamentally changed my coding workflow, the daily tools I rely on, what agentic architecture actually means, and where I think it's all heading.

Building SteamForge: A Desktop Achievement Manager

A deep dive into building a cross-platform Steam achievement manager with Go, Svelte 5, and Wails. Stack choices, key challenges, and what's next.

All posts →

Track record

15 years. 8 companies. Same instincts.

Senior since 2015. Tech Lead since 2018. Spent the last six years deep in enterprise SaaS at SOCi — building, optimising, and now teaching the team how to do it with AI agents.

  1. Senior Software Engineer — SOCi, Inc.

    Led full-stack architecture across a 50,000+ location enterprise SaaS platform. Delivered 40% API response-time improvement on the highest-traffic Listings endpoint. Pioneered AI-enhanced workflows across the engineering org with Claude Code, Cursor, and Augment. Authored 33 pages of internal docs and runs Claude Code workshops for the team.

  2. Software Engineer — SOCi, Inc.

    Built the ad publishing pipeline for Facebook & Google — multi-platform campaign management across tens of thousands of franchised businesses. Grew rapidly through mob programming.

  3. Frontend Tech Lead — Tipple

    Led the monolith-to-microservices migration. Owned AWS infrastructure (EC2, ECS, Lambda). React.js frontend with Selenium and Jest coverage. Slashed API response times via DB query optimisation.

  4. Senior Digital Developer — Tipple

    Full-stack on the on-demand delivery platform serving Australia.

  5. Senior Developer — fatfish creative

    Built the drag-and-drop form builder and registration systems for Mercedes-Benz Australia, handling 1,000+ concurrent users on AWS.

  6. Junior Web Developer — Furphy Media

    Campaign micro sites for Honda Australia. CodeIgniter, AngularJS, Backbone, Node.js.

  7. Junior Web Developer — fauvdesign, Allardice, Medtech

    WordPress / Drupal / Symfony. Healthcare patient management web app. Native Android with Bluetooth and multi-threading. The early-career stack-sampling that ages well.

  8. Owner & Freelance Developer

    Bespoke client work in PHP/Symfony. Slack bots, Swagger API generation, Datadog and Sentry integrations.

Stack

Primary
GoPHPJavaScriptTypeScriptPythonSQL
Frameworks
ReactSvelteNode.jsSymfonyLaravelWails
AI & agents
Claude CodeCursorAugmentClaude APIOllamaWhisper.cpp
Cloud & infra
AWSDockerECSLambdaEC2RabbitMQ
Monitoring
New RelicDatadogSentryELK
Earlier career
C#JavaAngularJSASP.NET

Contact

Let's talk.

Looking for Staff or Principal roles. Strongest fit: teams shipping infrastructure, developer tools, or AI-native products where engineering quality is taken seriously. Remote-first, async-friendly, opinionated about quality.

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