B.T. Franklin

Resume

Last updated 2026-08-24

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B.T. Franklin

Phoenix, Arizona

602-247-0439 | brandon.franklin@gmail.com

btfranklin.info | github.com/btfranklin

Professional Summary

Applied AI technical lead and software architect with 20+ years building enterprise software, developer tools, and product-facing systems. Combines hands-on agentic AI, platform architecture, full-stack engineering, product judgment, and published computational creativity research.

Professional Experience

Zilliant, Inc.

AI Tech Lead / Staff Software Engineer

April 2025 - July 2026

  • Served as organization-wide AI technical leader, guiding teams on LLMs, agents, evaluation practices, and modern AI development aligned with business goals.
  • Contributed to the React, Next.js, and Node.js client and server layers of an enterprise pricing application.
  • Architected and shipped a secure, customer-facing read-only data API across a legacy enterprise microservice stack in less than one month, earning a delivery bonus.
  • Refactored application data access behind semantic adapters, reducing coupling to a legacy internal data service and preparing the API for an independent service boundary.
  • Led and prototyped an AWS offering built with the Strands Agents SDK for conversational exploration of pricing formulas.
  • Architected the company's first Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and guided a third-party implementation team.
  • Designed MCP tools that retrieve calculated prices and explain start, target, and floor price formulas.
  • Shipped the MCP server for customers on Zilliant's older stack, supporting modernization and license-expansion work without claiming unverified revenue.
  • Led AI strategy across roughly six engineering teams, connecting product managers, engineering leaders, and implementers without direct management authority.
  • Created proposals, design guidance, proofs of concept, and reference implementations to turn emerging AI capabilities into buildable product and engineering direction.
  • Expanded AI-assisted engineering through Codex training, reusable review skills, and agent-guided development workflows.
  • Mentored junior and senior engineers through design explanation, domain transfer, and implementation guidance.

Software Architect

August 2022 - March 2025

  • Built a generative AI pipeline that integrated diverse pricing insights into customer-facing analytics in real time.
  • Led and shipped an AWS QuickSight and Amazon Q integration with embedded visualization and generative AI-assisted analysis.
  • Designed and launched the Zilliant Developer Experience CLI, reducing complex environment migrations from multiple days to a few hours.
  • Shaped architecture across AI, analytics, and developer enablement initiatives.

Staff Software Engineer

February 2020 - August 2022

  • Directed UI/UX strategy for enterprise Salesforce implementations, aligning usability with business objectives.
  • Built strategic proofs of concept that influenced company-wide technology direction and adoption decisions.
  • Aligned implementation decisions across globally distributed teams with broader technical strategy.

Senior Software Engineer

January 2009 - September 2019

  • Championed Salesforce Lightning Web Components adoption, contributing to UI modernization and improved application performance.
  • Led SalesMax development and mentored interns through product delivery that improved usability and competitiveness.
  • Contributed to full-stack engineering, front-end architecture, and product modernization across a decade of platform evolution.

Selected Founder-Led AI Products

RepoZest

Founder / Product Architect, 2026

  • Built and publicly deployed a solo GitHub App-backed repository intelligence SaaS, then sunset and open-sourced it after it did not gain customer traction.
  • Designed a Django monolith with web, worker, and scheduler services, GitHub App authentication, repository indexing, AI artifacts, billing, and operator workflows.
  • Built deterministic extraction across branch snapshots, file trees, source excerpts, commits, contributor aliases, pull requests, reviews, and path-level ownership facts.
  • Derived architecture areas before mapping paths to semantic systems and grounding contributor expertise inference.
  • Produced architecture and expertise reports, expert-routing suggestions, hotspot signals, maintenance pressure, and interactive answers from published expertise graphs.
  • Focused the product on architecture visibility, current-team expert discovery, knowledge concentration, ownership fragility, and coordination risk.
  • Built provider-neutral billing with Stripe-hosted payments, entitlement enforcement, trials, subscription normalization, and a future GitHub Marketplace adapter path.
  • Created Terraform, GitHub Actions workflows, deployment manifests, helper scripts, and operator runbooks for Sevalla.
  • Owned opportunity definition, product strategy, architecture, UX, AI pipelines, GitHub integration, billing, deployment, and go-to-market positioning.

Hiredar

Founder / Product Architect, 2025

  • Built and deployed a solo AI recruiting SaaS in roughly two months, accelerating product, engineering, UI, deployment, and go-to-market work with AI tools.
  • Designed resume parsing, structured candidate extraction, and explainable candidate-to-role matching.
  • Built self-service recruiting flows for authentication, job creation, bulk uploads, candidate review, match lists, and shortlist export.
  • Built a Django and Celery pipeline that extracted candidate data with OpenAI APIs and stored embedding vectors in Pinecone.
  • Designed RAG and semantic matching across skills, experience, career direction, qualifications, and holistic fit.
  • Implemented holistic, skills, experience, wildcard, and qualifications matching lenses with Pinecone namespaces.
  • Built pay-as-you-go monetization with free credits, Stripe Checkout, recruiter balances, and premium-action credit deduction.
  • Built HTMX polling interfaces for long-running jobs, task status, and per-owner asynchronous work visibility.
  • Deployed hosted data, Celery workers, queued email, S3-style storage, and production settings on Sevalla.
  • Created positioning, landing-page messaging, demos, video concepts, and recruiter-focused campaign materials.
  • Added guardrail checks and corrective loops for resume parsing and candidate extraction quality.
  • Owned product strategy, architecture, full-stack implementation, UX, deployment, pricing, and live-market validation.

Selected Open Source AI Work

  • Published open-source AI and developer tools for agent orchestration, grounding, prompt engineering, and engineering automation.
  • Created contract4agents, a typed language and toolchain for agent interfaces, context, capabilities, policies, guards, assertions, eval packs, monitors, and provider-neutral manifests.
  • Created agentic-django for OpenAI Agents SDK applications with persistent sessions, tool calls, background tasks, and HTMX or REST status polling.
  • Created agent-simulator to test realistic agent conversations against configurable mock MCP tools and real provider APIs before server implementation.
  • Maintains reusable public agent skills for Django, OpenAI, web UI, Python packaging, structured LLMs, code review, production readiness, and agent-legible repositories.
  • Created compendiumscribe, a research workflow with planning, web research, verification, structured Pydantic output, citation tracking, and multi-format rendering.
  • Created promptdown to express reusable structured LLM prompts in Markdown files separate from application code.
  • Created release-notes-scribe, a GitHub Action that drafts release notes from tag-to-tag commits with the OpenAI Responses API.
  • Created pywebview-htmx for declarative Python desktop interactions with target swaps, loading states, concurrency controls, and lifecycle events.
  • Other work includes wordsmith-engine and earlier generative creativity projects connected to published computational creativity research.

Additional Experience

  • Senior Salesforce Engineer, Camping World, Inc. (Sep 2019 - Feb 2020): Rewrote a complex store location management application using a more extensible architecture and modern development practices.
  • Senior Software Engineer, Confirma, Inc. (2006 - 2008): Refactored medical imaging software, expanding clinical applicability and strengthening product value.
  • Senior Software Engineer, Teranode Corporation (2005 - 2006): Built intuitive data-management interfaces that improved user productivity and accuracy.
  • Software Engineer, Digital Harbor, Inc. (2000 - 2005): Developed data-driven user interfaces supporting strategic analysis and decision-making.

Research and Publications

  • AI work spans graduate-level coursework in the 1990s, computational creativity research, expert systems, game intelligence, generative art, and modern LLM and agentic systems.
  • Franklin, B.T. "Spooklight: A Generative Approach to AI-Driven Storytelling," Proceedings of Generative Art Conference, vol. 27, Dec. 2024, pp. 50-59.
  • Franklin, B.T. "Resonant Element: An Application for the Continuous Generation of Pop-Inspired Music," Proceedings of the 3rd Computer Simulation of Musical Creativity Conference, Aug. 2018.
  • Franklin, B.T. "SongSkill: A System for Continuous, Emotionally-Adaptive Music Generation," Proceedings of Generative Art Conference, vol. 19, Dec. 2016, pp. 124-37.

Education

Transylvania University, Lexington, KY

BA in Computer Science, 1997

Minor in Psychology

  • Graduated with Honors
  • Recipient of the Computer Science Award
  • First student in school's history to complete three Senior Honors projects

Skills

Programming Languages: Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Apex, Swift

AI Models and APIs: OpenAI GPT Models, OpenAI Image Generation, OpenAI Embeddings, OpenAI Speech-to-Text, OpenAI Interactive Voice, Anthropic Claude, ElevenLabs Speech Generation

Frameworks and Platforms: REST APIs, Django, Celery, HTMX, Pydantic, PydanticAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, Docker, PostgreSQL, SQLite, AWS Services, AWS QuickSight, Amazon Q, Strands Agents SDK, GitHub Actions, Terraform, React, Next.js, Node.js, Tailwind CSS, Salesforce Lightning, Lightning Web Components, oclif

AI Methods: Agentic Systems, Model Context Protocol (MCP), RAG, Embeddings, Vector Stores, Semantic Search, Pinecone, Structured Extraction, Prompt Engineering, Tool Use, Planning Loops, Multi-Agent Systems, Guardrail Design, Rubric Grading, Human Review, Tracing, Observability, LLM Evaluation, Agent Evaluation

Architecture and Leadership: Framework Design, API Design, Platform Design, AI Product Architecture, Reference Implementations, Technical Strategy, UI/UX Design, Developer Experience, Cross-Functional Leadership, Mentorship

Engineering Tools: Codex, Git, Perforce, Jira, Confluence, Visual Studio Code, CI/CD, HTML/CSS