I like figuring out how the pieces fit together.

I’m a systems architect and builder. I like understanding what a business is trying to accomplish, following that into the systems and the work people do, and figuring out what needs to change. I move comfortably between a conversation with an executive and an implementation with an engineer because each tells me something I need to understand the other.

My career has included transformations at progressively larger scales, from a client platform to a fintech’s engineering organization to an enterprise-wide architecture. The scope has grown, but the work still depends on connecting business priorities, technical decisions, and what the people carrying them out can sustain.

Following a decision into the work

At a large wireless carrier, I architected the enterprise future state while working directly with the CIO and COO. Understanding how finance, revenue assurance, and fraud were owned and audited led me to redraw boundaries that had made sense technically. The architecture became more useful because it reflected how the business actually operated.

At a fintech processing $1 billion a year, restoring reliable delivery meant working on both the organization and its core systems. I rebuilt the payment ingestion path alongside the head of architecture, developed engineering leaders, and worked directly with customer CTOs on priorities we could deliver. The technical work and the commitments we made to customers had to support each other.

That carries into the AI platforms and internal agents I’ve built. I work through how they fit the team’s existing systems, what they are allowed to do, and what it takes to check their work. The investment has to make sense once integration, review, and ongoing operation are included.

Developing judgment

I learned a great deal about developing judgment in the Navy’s nuclear propulsion program. You had to explain a running system well enough that someone else could operate it, and a trainee’s questions could expose gaps in your own understanding. I’ve carried that into leading engineers and managers: give people real responsibility, work through the reasoning with them, and stay available when a decision gets difficult.

I keep building

Plainsight Systems is my independent systems and AI lab. Building an inference engine leads to questions about model behavior. Working on rendering gives me another way to investigate GPU performance. Those connections keep me curious, and building the systems gives me a way to test what I think I understand.

I publish the code and explain what I learn, including approaches that didn’t hold up. The projects also give me a place to work through agent-assisted engineering practices on substantial systems and see where the tools help, where they fail, and what the engineer still needs to own.

You can find my longer writing at andrewphunter.com and my professional background on LinkedIn.