Open to Staff / Lead roles
Andrew
Abril.
Engineer rebuilding a creative practice in public — fifteen years of finance rigor, now building an AI consumer product full-time.
- 01Minari · AI product
Minari — production LLM pipeline
Eight-stage production pipeline that turns a child's name and age into an illustrated bedtime story — direct Anthropic API for story text and image direction, Google's Gemini API for illustrated scenes with character consistency, FLUX 2 Pro for fallbacks, and OpenAI TTS for audio. Zod-validated structured outputs and a self-correcting validation/retry stage throughout; in-house, Postgres-backed AI observability per run; migrated off AWS Bedrock to the direct Anthropic API to eliminate production throttling.
- 02Balyasny · Internal platform
Equity research platform
Daily-driver research tooling for ~1,000 investment professionals — the system of record for idea generation, tracking, and post-mortems. Grew the team from a 2-engineer pod to eight.
- 03Balyasny · Retrieval layer
Semantic search across 7M+ research items
Partnered with the Applied AI team to ship production semantic search across 7M+ research items (analyst notes, filings, transcripts). Owned the platform integration, query interface, and rollout to ~1,000 users.
- 04Minari · Tooling
Claude Code "software factory"
Custom AI-native development environment built on Claude Code: 35 modular skills across frontend, backend, database, AI orchestration, and content pipelines; 94 structured scenario specs used as inputs to agent-driven development; a canonical telemetry schema; a `/learn` command that refines skills from production signal; persistent agent memory. The infrastructure that lets a 2-person Minari team ship a 17-workspace monorepo.
- 05MacKay Shields · Data platform
First firm-wide data warehouse + Detroit dashboard
Replaced the Excel-era workflow with the firm's first unified data warehouse, serving ~100 analysts and PMs across four investment teams — including the municipal-credit dashboard that ran during Detroit's 2013 bankruptcy.
§ 03 — Experience
Where I've been.
Fifteen years in finance engineering, now full-time building an AI consumer product.
Dec 2024 – Present
Minari·Founding Engineer
AI-powered consumer storytelling product
Architected the full TypeScript monorepo (17 workspace members), an 8-step multi-model content-generation pipeline (direct Anthropic API, Google's Gemini API, OpenAI TTS), and a custom Claude Code development environment with 35 modular skills. In-house, Postgres-backed AI observability.
TypeScript · Next.js · Expo · Hono / tRPC · Drizzle · Claude / Gemini / FLUX
Aug 2020 – Jun 2025
Balyasny Asset Management·Lead Software Engineer
Global multi-strategy hedge fund · ~$20Bn equity exposure
Grew research tooling from a 2-engineer pod to an 8-engineer team over five years, serving ~1,000 investment professionals daily. Led the Research Platform and dynamic security-coverage charting; received the Team Excellence Award in 2024.
TypeScript · React · Next.js · C# / .NET · Python · PostgreSQL · Highcharts
May 2011 – Aug 2020
MacKay Shields·Software Developer
Fixed-income and equity investment manager · ~$110B AUM
Built the firm's first firm-wide data warehouse, executive risk dashboards, and the municipal-bond risk dashboard during the 2013 Detroit bankruptcy. Served ~100 analysts and PMs across four investment teams.
C# / .NET · SQL Server · SSIS · ASP.NET
§ 04 — About
The short version.
Fifteen years as a software engineer inside hedge funds — nine at MacKay Shields building its first firm-wide data warehouse, and five leading research tooling at Balyasny Asset Management. Now I'm full-time co-founding Minari, a small AI consumer product. Outside work I'm usually losing a slow, multi-year argument with my espresso machine.