James Russo — AI Agent, Full-Stack & Cloud Engineering Consultant

AI agents and production systems for businesses that run on real workflows.

Twenty-five years of software engineering. I design and build agentic AI systems, LLM-powered automation, and the full-stack products and cloud infrastructure they run on, for regulated, data-heavy, and legacy-bound environments where a demo isn't enough.

Venue & sports marketing · SaaS · 2024–present

Planvue

Sole engineer on a multi-tenant platform where venue operators catalog every signage and branding placement on an interactive map: drawn areas, per-location print specs (dimensions, bleed, materials, designer notes), reference photos, downloadable design templates, favorites, and per-venue user management.

Angular 17LeafletAuth0FastAPISQLAlchemyPostgreSQLTerraform / TerragruntFargateGitHub ActionsSentry

Role: Architecture, backend, front end, infrastructure, CI/CD
Data: Migrated a legacy MongoDB dataset into a relational model with Alembic migrations
Cloud: Multi-account AWS organization (shared services, dev, prod) built from reusable modules
Scale: ~800 commits across API, web, and infrastructure repositories

Healthcare · Practice-management platform · 2025–present

DSO operations platform

Principal engineer (contract) on the internal platform a mid-sized dental DSO runs its offices on. The biggest piece is insurance-verification automation: eligibility requests are generated from the schedule, routed by payer to an EDI 270/271 clearinghouse or a headless-browser scraper for that payer's portal, cross-checked, classified (payer answer vs. our failure), and written back into OpenDental, with plain-language failure reasons for the front desk and a Datadog dashboard for the RCM team. The scrapers run through a centralized egress gateway I designed so each office's traffic leaves from its own clinic network, with per-location credentials resolved from 1Password, MFA/OTP handling, circuit breakers, failure capture for post-mortems, and an LLM judge that grades ambiguous outcomes.

Around that: an event-driven merge train with land-on-green batching and chat announcements; migration of Rails encrypted credentials to environment-sourced secrets; DB-backed feature flags with percentage rollouts; and an OAuth 2.0 + PKCE layer so Claude and other LLM clients can reach the platform's MCP tools.

RailsSidekiqEDI 270/271PlaywrightTailscale / SOCKS51PasswordDatadogTerraformECS FargateMCP / OAuth

Desktop: Electron client for the front desk: Action Cable and SQS-driven notifications, AppStream overlay, floating chat windows, time clock with geolocation, release channels, Datadog RUM. 900+ commits.
OpenDental: Maintained a customized C#/WPF fork: appointment-indicator API, referral flows, SQS messaging, off-UI-thread image loading, tag-stamped builds with SSM deploys and rollback.
Infra: Terraform for production, utility, and marketing stacks: GuardDuty, cost-anomaly alerts, 55 CloudFront sites imported, Datadog monitors as code, Fargate Spot tracking.
Scale: 1,800+ commits and 725+ merged PRs across four repositories in 16 months

Healthcare · Agentic AI

Agentic claims processing

Claude on Amazon Bedrock behind a BAA, with a custom MCP server and computer-use, operating a Windows line-of-business application end to end. Extends work I co-invented at Overjet on ML-based claims adjudication at the point of care.

BedrockMCPComputer useHIPAA

Telephony · Speech AI

Real-time speech pipeline

Asterisk/FreePBX to Deepgram streaming to Redis to FastAPI, with domain-vocabulary tuning feeding downstream workflow automation. Includes IP-microphone capture design (Shure, Dante) for ambient documentation.

AsteriskDeepgramRedisFastAPIDante

Regulated SaaS · Platform & scrapers

HIPAA-scoped workflow platform

FastAPI, Celery, and PostgreSQL on K3s with ArgoCD; transactional outbox for reliable events; an EventBridge bus-per-trust-boundary architecture that keeps sensitive data domains isolated. A fleet of headless-browser scrapers pulls eligibility, claims, and remittance data from payer portals and practice-management systems that offer no API, with credential handling and failure classification built for unattended runs.

K3sArgoCDCeleryEventBridgePlaywright

Finance ops · Reconciliation

Payment reconciliation pipeline

Automated matching of card-processor deposits to ledger entries, with exceptions surfaced for review instead of buried in a spreadsheet.

PythonPostgreSQL

Analytics · Data engineering

Operational data warehouse

Bitemporal, append-only event model over twenty years of transactional history; dbt star schema for reporting; variance-based anomaly detection that flags misconfiguration before it costs money.

dbtPostgreSQLBitemporal

Finance ops · Integration

Accounting integration

Xero API integration for an application running on private address space, with OAuth callback, DNS, and certificate design across the firewall boundary.

Xero APIOAuthDNS / TLS

Consumer hardware · Aviation

Hardware product, inception to delivery

Founded and ran Aeroluxmaps (2020–2025), designing and manufacturing custom fiber-optic-lit aviation maps: electronics, fabrication, and the business around them.

ElectronicsFabricationE-commerce

AI agents and production systems for businesses that run on real workflows.

Three things you won't get from an agency.

Zero to production, alone.

AI at production scale.

An operator's perspective.

What I take on.

Agentic AI & LLM workflows

Full-stack product engineering

Cloud infrastructure & integration

Data engineering & analytics

Engineering summaries, not marketing tiles.

Planvue

DSO operations platform

Agentic claims processing

Real-time speech pipeline

HIPAA-scoped workflow platform

Payment reconciliation pipeline

Operational data warehouse

Accounting integration

Hardware product, inception to delivery

Where the years went.

President, Halo3 Consulting, LLC

Principal Software Engineer (Contract), mid-sized dental DSO

Business manager and co-owner, pediatric dental practice

Principal Software Engineer, Overjet

President, Aeroluxmaps

Software Developer, Yodle

Named inventor.

Modular platform enabling heterogeneous devices, sensors and actuators to integrate automatically into heterogeneous networks

Modular platform enabling heterogeneous devices, sensors and actuators to integrate automatically into heterogeneous networks

Point of Care Claim Processing System and Method

Background and how I work.

How I work

Education

Industries

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