I ship products people actually use— from discovery through production.

About

Product engineer who closes the loop

I'm a senior product engineer who defaults to full-stack ownership with a front-end emphasis. React, TypeScript, and Next.js are what I ship today; Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB show up repeatedly across my career.

As founder and lead engineer at Plantfolio, I built an AI-native plant management platform—LLM vision, conversational UX, semantic search over 40,000+ species, and a production MCP server on the live stack—on a monorepo structured for agent-friendly iteration. Cursor (top 1% user) and Claude-class agents are part of my daily workflow; I still own architecture, tests, and what reaches production. I also build agentic ops workflows for outside clients—connecting the tools operators already use so work moves without copy-paste.

Before Plantfolio, I shipped at Tilia (payments and identity tooling), Bloom.wine (commerce for wineries on Shopify Plus), and Ply Interactive (agency work including React Native apps at major event scale). I lead through pairing, review, and clear execution—no direct reports, but real technical influence.

B.S. Finance, Santa Clara University — 2010

12+

Years shipping software

40k+

Species in Plantfolio catalog

90%+

Test coverage at Tilia

Top 1%

Cursor power user

Selected work

Products I've built, scaled, and still care about

Plantfolio

2023 — Present

Founder & Lead Engineer

AI-native plant management: photo ID, Sage assistant, smart tagging, vector search, and a production MCP server so external AI clients can call platform tools. Full-stack Next.js monorepo with Clerk, Stripe, Algolia, and Neon Postgres—designed for both customers and coding agents.

• Next.js
• AI / RAG
• MCP
• TypeScript
• Monorepo

View project →

JC Baldwin

2026 — Present

Agentic ops · Independent

Designed and shipped a multi-agent workflow for a specialty construction firm: Dropbox package intake, document parsing, structured estimate artifacts, and Notion sync—so operators advance work instead of copy-pasting between tools. Human-owned source-of-truth systems (rates, commercial policy); agents handle the pipeline.

• Agent workflows
• Cursor
• Notion
• Document AI
• TypeScript

Bloom.wine

2020 — 2022

Senior Software Engineer

Greenfield Next.js admin for winery clients on Shopify Plus. Rails GraphQL APIs, DatoCMS, and integrations across Stripe, Mailchimp, and Shipstation—much of the stack still in production.

• Next.js
• GraphQL
• Rails
• Commerce

View project →

Fintech · Payments

Digital payments platform

KYC, identity tooling, and platform APIs for regulated money movement

KYCGraphQLRisk tooling

Tilia

2023

Senior Software Engineer

Payments platform tooling: KYC and identity-adjacent features, GraphQL API evolution, Chakra UI adoption, and a reporting dashboard shipped in the first two months on the team.

• React
• GraphQL
• Payments
• Design systems

Washington State Fair

Agency era

React Native · Ply Interactive

Cross-platform mobile app in sustained multi-year production—very high traffic during fair season, from tens of thousands into hundreds of thousands of users cumulatively.

• React Native
• Mobile
• High traffic

View project →

Experience

A dozen years across agency, platform, and founder roles

1. 2026 — Present

   Current

   Independent Engineer

   Agentic workflows for operators

   Help small businesses turn multi-step operations into reliable agent pipelines that connect the tools they already use.

   • JC Baldwin: end-to-end estimate ops agents (intake → parse → package → price → Notion sync)
   • Skills-as-spec pattern so each agent has a clear contract, handoff, and write scope
   • Kept client systems of record human-owned; agents automate movement, not judgment

2. Nov 2023 — Present

   Founder & Lead Engineer

   Plantfolio

   AI-native product and engineering from zero to production—including an MCP server on the live stack.

   • LLM vision, chat, and RAG search in production
   • Production MCP server on the live stack (Model Context Protocol)
   • MongoDB → PostgreSQL migration on Neon
   • Garden-center signage automation case study

3. Jan — Aug 2023

   Senior Software Engineer

   Tilia

   Payments platform tools team; GraphQL and design-system leadership.

   • Chakra UI adoption across the team
   • 90%+ unit test coverage
   • Homepage reporting dashboard in first 60 days

4. Sep 2020 — Oct 2022

   Senior Software Engineer

   Bloom.wine

   Greenfield admin and GraphQL APIs for winery commerce.

   • Next.js admin still in wide production use
   • Shopify Plus integrations at scale
   • Informal tech lead via pairing and review

5. Aug 2019 — May 2020

   Software Engineer II

   Tune Inc

   Marketplace automation pipelines and legacy React modernization.

   • 10–15 min workflow → 10–30 sec automation
   • 50% smaller production bundles

6. Jun 2014 — Jul 2019

   Software Developer

   Ply Interactive

   Agency delivery: React Native, Rails, GraphQL, and commerce platforms.

   • Multiple production React Native apps
   • Bloom.wine product built internally
   • GraphQL and Gatsby agency transition