Principal Software Engineer | Hands-on IC & Engineering Manager | Developer Platforms & AI
Seattle, WA | (408) 841-6194 | joshpal97@gmail.com
LinkedIn · GitHub · Personal site
Experience
SeekOut — Principal Software Engineer (Hands-on IC & Engineering Manager)
October 2026 – Present | Bellevue, WA
- Architected and built the SeekOut Developer Platform for developer integrations and AI-agent applications, working primarily as a hands-on IC while managing a small team and coordinating delivery across engineering teams.
- Implemented shared authentication, authorization, and usage-based billing for SeekOut: scoped credentials and secure delegation, plus a PostgreSQL credit ledger, Stripe purchasing, atomic reservation and settlement, and retry-safe reconciliation.
- Evolved SeekOut’s MCP architecture alongside the protocol, introducing versioned, gateway-style routing and provider-specific endpoints to accommodate differences across AI clients while sharing core capabilities.
- Helped build a Databricks analytics platform giving Customer Success and Sales per-user and per-client usage insights, with ROI reporting that informed senior leadership decisions.
- Delivered company talks on architecture and AI development and introduced an engineering-wide RFC workflow, making cross-team design decisions, tradeoffs, and owner accountability visible and versioned.
SeekOut — AI Engineering Manager (Senior Software Engineer 2)
December 2025 – September 2026 | Bellevue, WA
- Built and launched SeekOut’s MCP product end to end, including Apps UI, OAuth, Kubernetes, public docs, and the ChatGPT App Store; supported customer setup and demos with Sales.
- Improved public people-search benchmark precision from 88% to 98.3%, then scaled evaluation coverage to 1,400 queries while cutting agent turns from 15–25 to 4–11.
- Built and validated a multi-model sourcing agent with React, OpenAI Agents SDK, LiteLLM, Redis, and live search; cut strategy generation from 28+ to about 8 tool calls and chart latency from about 5s to 1s cold/instant cached.
- Built a workbench with 70+ workflows and 20 specialized agents, helping drive company-wide agentic-development adoption through shared tooling and demos while managing the AI engineering team.
SeekOut — Senior Software Engineer 2 (promoted three times from Software Engineer)
March 2021 – December 2025 | Bellevue, WA
- Productionized LLM-powered candidate scorecards that surface top candidates from 1,000+ applicants per job and embedded evaluation into customer ATS workflows.
- Built Spot’s multi-ATS ingestion and Unified Profile platform, enabling inbound workflows and cross-index search.
- Built LLM- and vector-assisted natural-language search for Azure Cognitive Search and Lucene.
- Migrated ETL pipelines for multiple clients from Azure Functions to Databricks, reducing pipeline errors and building Delta Lake tables for time-series and business analytics.
- Built and operated an external partner API handling 25 million calls per week.
Earlier experience
Counterpart — Software Engineer
May 2020 – March 2021
React architecture and .NET MVC delivery for Indiana public-sector products.
The Permanente Medical Group, Inc. — Junior .NET Analyst / Software Engineer, Contract
February 2020 – May 2020
.NET Core and SQL tools for Genetics.
DMI — Software Engineer
June 2019 – February 2020
Angular/Node.js/AWS auction operations and C++/.NET simulation.
Education
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
2015 – 2019 | Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Skills
- Languages & Frameworks: C#, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL, .NET, React, Node.js
- AI & Search: MCP, OpenAI Agents SDK, LiteLLM, LLM evaluation, Azure Cognitive Search, Lucene
- Data & Billing: PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Redis, Databricks, Delta Lake, ETL, Stripe
- Cloud & Security: Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, OAuth/SSO, REST APIs, Application Insights