Kelvin Rodriguez

Engineering leader: applied AI and healthcare, Series A to D.

Most recently Head of Engineering at Float Health, where a team of eight shipped concurrent HIPAA and SOC 2 Type I and II certifications on clean first attempts. Before that, scaled Parachute Home's engineering org from 5 to 15 and led its e-commerce replatform, twice, in opposite directions. Fifteen years from production deep learning in 2013 to agent-driven delivery today.

Open to Head or VP of Engineering roles · Series A to D · applied AI or healthcare · Denver or remote

Profile section · 2011 – 2026

Experience

  1. STA. 62025 – 2026CREW 8

    Float Health,Head of Engineering

    Series A in-home-care marketplace. Owned engineering, security, and compliance.

  2. STA. 52021 – 2025CREW 15

    Parachute Home,Head of Engineering

    DTC home-goods brand expanding into retail. Ran engineering plus corporate and retail IT.

  3. STA. 42019 – 2021PLATFORM

    Nurx,Senior Engineering Manager

    HIPAA telehealth. Ran backend and platform engineering for the clinical service. First healthcare post.

  4. STA. 32015 – 2019INTL BILLING

    Ambit Energy,Lead Staff Engineer, Billing & Transactions

    International retail energy. Tech lead for billing and transactions through white-label expansion; led the on-prem to Azure Kubernetes migration.

  5. STA. 22013 – 2015SUB-10MS

    Capitalogix,AI Software Engineer

    Trading-signal models in production for live capital, on GPUs, a decade before the LLM wave. Sub-10ms decision pipelines in C.

  6. STA. 12011 – 2013SOLO

    Independent,Freelance Engineer

    Self-directed client work. The trailhead.

Summit log

Work I'm proud of

  1. 01STA. 6

    Rebuilt an SDLC around a swarm of coding agents

    Not a tooling pilot: the whole team ships through task-routed agents under central orchestration. Deploys got 45% more frequent and recovery time halved, and I stopped reviewing boilerplate forever.

  2. 02STA. 6

    HIPAA and SOC 2, treated as engineering problems

    Two audit regimes at once, with eight engineers, while the backend moved to FHIR Care Plans. We built controls the way we build systems: designed, tested, on one roadmap. Clean first attempts on both.

  3. 03STA. 5

    Grew engineering from 5 to 15 without breaking it

    A three-round hiring loop built around decision-making, and onboarding that cut ramp time in half. The same year, the team absorbed a brick-and-mortar retail expansion.

  4. 04STA. 4

    A job queue you can trust with patient data

    Telehealth background jobs carry PHI, which rules out most off-the-shelf answers. I built a HIPAA-compliant queue on TypeScript and BullMQ, then built the clinical workflows that ran on top of it.

  5. 05STA. 3

    The company's first observability service

    An international billing engine, on-prem, and no way to watch it run. I built Ambit's first observability service so billing stopped being a black box.

  6. 06STA. 3

    A Rust parser that refuses to retire

    Ambit billed internationally through fixed-length files. I rewrote the parser in Rust: 13x the throughput, and it is still in production.

Field method

How I run engineering

Small teams, high leverage
Eight engineers passed two concurrent audits; fifteen ran a national retail brand. I keep my orgs around twenty on purpose.
Process earns its keep
Six-week Shape-Up cycles, continuous delivery on merge, and you-build-it-you-run-it on call. Anything that stops paying rent goes.
Agents are part of the team
My teams ship with orchestrated coding agents, and I run the same stack at home on my own hardware. I do not recommend tools I will not operate.
Kind over nice
Stop being nice; be kind instead. Direct feedback, opinions strongly stated and moderately held.
Build vs buy, revisited
I replatformed Parachute off Shopify when the math said build, and recommended the return when Shopify caught up. The right call is the right call, including against your own work.
Predictability even over feature count
Hard calls get written as even-overs: a trade-off between two good things, chosen on purpose. If you don't pick your trade-offs, the world picks them for you.
Equipment

TypeScript · Python · Rust · Go · Ruby

React · Next.js · Node · PostgreSQL · AWS · Kubernetes · Terraform · Snowflake

Off the trail

Elsewhere

  • Backpacking

    Working through Colorado's 14ers and segments of the Continental Divide Trail, with three dogs setting the pace.

  • West Coast Swing

    Advanced division, competing internationally. Same discipline as engineering: fundamentals, reps, and reading your partner.

  • Tabletop

    Long-running D&D and Pathfinder campaigns. I build the worlds and write the backstories.