B.T. Franklin

Resume

Last updated 2026-06-24

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B.T. Franklin

Phoenix, Arizona

Applied AI Technical Lead

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

btfranklin.info | github.com/btfranklin

Professional Summary

Applied AI technical lead and software architect with 20+ years of experience across enterprise software, developer tooling, and product-facing systems.

  • Focused on generative AI, large language models (LLMs), agentic systems, and AI product architecture.
  • Experienced in moving emerging AI capabilities into useful engineering workflows and product experiences.
  • Combines full-stack engineering depth with product thinking, UX sensibility, technical leadership, and published computational creativity research.

Core Expertise

  • Applied AI and Large Language Model (LLM) Systems
  • Agentic Workflow Design and Evaluation
  • AI Product Architecture
  • Developer Experience and Platform Tooling
  • Full-Stack Product Engineering
  • Technical Leadership

Professional Experience

Zilliant, Inc.

AI Tech Lead / Staff Software Engineer

April 2025 - Present

  • Serve as organization-wide AI technical leader, guiding engineering teams on adoption of large language models (LLMs), agents, evaluation practices, and modern AI development patterns aligned with business goals.
  • Architected the company's first Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and directed implementation by a third-party contractor, opening new enterprise revenue opportunities.
  • Drove broad adoption of AI tooling across engineering, contributing to a significant increase in developer productivity.
  • Provided ongoing mentorship to engineers at all levels of seniority.

Software Architect

August 2022 - March 2025

  • Designed and implemented a custom generative AI pipeline that enabled real-time integration of diverse pricing insights into customer-facing analytics experiences.
  • Led integration of AWS QuickSight and Amazon Q, improving data visualization capabilities, accelerating user adoption, and enhancing customer decision support.
  • Designed and launched the Zilliant Developer Experience (ZDX) CLI, streamlining internal and external developer workflows and substantially reducing configuration migration effort.
  • Helped shape architectural direction across AI, analytics, and developer enablement initiatives.

Staff Software Engineer

February 2020 - August 2022

  • Directed UI/UX strategy for enterprise Salesforce implementations, improving usability and aligning product experiences with business objectives.
  • Developed strategic proof-of-concept solutions that influenced company-wide technology direction and adoption decisions.
  • Facilitated collaboration across globally distributed teams to align implementation choices with broader technical strategy.

Senior Software Engineer

January 2009 - September 2019

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

Selected Founder-Led AI Products

RepoZest

Founder / Product Architect, 2026 - Present

  • Building an AI-powered organizational intelligence platform for GitHub repositories that analyzes architecture, contributor expertise, repository history, and live development activity to produce actionable engineering insights.
  • Own end-to-end product execution, including opportunity definition, product strategy, system architecture, UX, AI pipeline design, GitHub integration model, and go-to-market positioning.

Hiredar

Founder / Product Architect, 2025

  • Conceived, architected, and launched an AI recruiting platform focused on resume parsing, structured candidate extraction, and AI-assisted candidate-to-role matching.
  • Led the full product lifecycle independently, including product strategy, application architecture, full-stack implementation, UX design, deployment, pricing model definition, and live-market validation.

Selected Open Source AI Work

  • Built and published open source AI and developer tooling spanning agent orchestration, AI grounding, prompt engineering, and engineering automation.
  • Notable projects include agentic-django, a Django-native framework for multi-step agent workflows; compendiumscribe, a tool for generating structured knowledge compendiums for AI grounding; and promptdown, a structured prompt engineering library for modular large language model prompt design.

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

  • 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

Technologies: Large Language Model (LLM) Applications, Agentic Systems, Model Context Protocol (MCP), REST APIs, Salesforce Lightning, AWS QuickSight, Amazon Q, Visual Studio Code, oclif

Methodologies: AI Development, Prompt Engineering, Large Language Model (LLM) Evaluation, Agent Evaluation, Agile

Other Skills: Software Architecture, AI Product Architecture, Full-Stack Development, UI/UX Design, Developer Experience, Git, Perforce, Jira, Confluence, HTML/CSS