Platform engineering · AI security · Agent infrastructure

Ashton Damrel

I build production systems that stay up and AI agents that stay inside their boundaries. Six years across Go and Rust backends, cloud and container platforms, and Linux systems, most recently as the sole engineer behind an e-commerce platform.

Open to fully remote staff and principal roles in AI security, agent infrastructure and security platforms. Based in South Florida.

Experience

Principal Platform Engineer

Influxer Inc.Aug 2024 – Oct 2026

Sole engineer at a sports-merchandise e-commerce startup selling athlete and school storefronts on a hosted commerce platform. I owned everything from the backend to production operations.

  • Built the Go backend: REST API, MySQL, and NATS JetStream work queues driving order processing and product creation, integrated with Shopify's GraphQL APIs.
  • Ran AWS-hosted container infrastructure with Docker and Traefik, with blue/green deploys from GitHub Actions and later a deploy agent I designed to remove that dependency.
  • Built the image pipeline that renders per-athlete print assets and packs DTF gang sheets, stored on Cloudflare R2 and Images.
  • Moved observability from Datadog to Grafana, Loki and Prometheus with Slack alerting, and wrote the incident runbooks for every failure mode I hit.
  • Ran an always-on AI agent with scoped production access: a fixed SSH verb set with credential redaction at the source, a read-only database grant as a hard boundary, secrets only from a secret store, and a second-model review before production merges. I tightened its permissions after each real incident.

Senior Software Developer

SR TechnologiesMay 2023 – Aug 2024
  • Built Linux software and automation across RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu and OpenWRT, with Go and React utilities and Docker, Ansible and Kubernetes tooling.
  • Integrated hardware-facing functionality in C and Go over I2C.

Software Developer

L3HarrisOct 2021 – May 2023
  • Developed Linux applications in C++, Qt/QML and Java, integrated with operating-system services and SELinux.
  • Implemented an LDAP client with biometric authentication and automatic home-directory mounting.

Programmer Analyst

CGI Inc.Jun 2020 – Oct 2021
  • Automated cross-platform administration in Bash and PowerShell, saving more than 1,600 labor hours.
  • Maintained Linux and Solaris systems and ported C and Perl applications from Solaris to RHEL.

Side projects

Self-hosted AI agent gateway

Rustlocal inferenceMCPsandboxingRAG

A personal AI assistant I run end to end on an NVIDIA DGX Spark at home, designed security-first. The gateway is a Rust workspace: local models served by vLLM and llama.cpp, tool calls gated by a signed manifest and deterministic authorization tiers, sandboxed execution, approvals that leave an audit trail, and an egress proxy with an allowlist. A retrieval layer (SQLite as the source of truth, Qdrant for vectors) keeps trusted sources and web results apart, and anything read from the web taints the session so it cannot escalate to write tools.

Job search pipeline

RustPlaywrightlocal LLMsGmail (read-only)

The system I am using to run this job search. It discovers postings straight from company applicant-tracking boards, screens them with local models against a requirement table, and tailors each resume and cover letter behind a deterministic fact gate and an independent model review, so nothing reaches an employer that my record does not support. Approved Greenhouse applications submit themselves; boards that present a CAPTCHA hand back to me in a live browser view, because the pipeline never tries to defeat bot checks. Replies are classified from a read-only mailbox, and every status change needs an authenticated sender.

jgdiff.lol

Next.jsPostgresrate-limited Riot API worker

A League of Legends stats site for my friend group, public at jgdiff.lol. A worker holds the only API key behind a priority rate limiter with separate foreground and crawler lanes, and pre-aggregates champion, matchup and build data so pages stay fast. On top sit group features: an LP race, duo stats, a draft analyzer and a weekly Discord digest.

Desktop shells

QMLQuickshellC#PowerShell

Two desktop rebuilds done for the fun of it. quickshell-starlite is a morphing-island shell for a Linux tablet, built on what Plasma already runs instead of new daemons. On Windows I rebuilt the COSMIC desktop with Rainmeter plus small native helpers for rounded window frames, wallpaper-matched accents, game-mode process suspension and a watchdog that restarts anything that dies.