McKay Smalley

Senior Software Engineer · Agentic AI Systems

I build production AI infrastructure and scalable backend platforms. From MCP integrations to agentic development that multiplies what a team can ship, I turn new AI capability into systems people depend on.

What I’ve been building

More than ten years shipping production software, recently focused on agentic development, high-assurance systems, and platforms that stay reliable under real load.

  1. Senior Software Engineer

    2025 – Present

    One Claim Solution · Remote

    • Pioneered Cursor-based agentic development: custom MCP integrations, shared context patterns, and a production MCP gateway across Postgres, logs, errors, and Redis.
    • Designed and owned an end-to-end AI code review tool from prototype through company-wide adoption.
    • Scaled communication backends for 900k+ conversations and 7.3M+ messages; cut timeout bottlenecks by moving heavy LLM work off the request path.
  2. Software Engineer → Senior Software Engineer

    2021 – 2025

    WorkWave (formerly Slingshot Technology) · Remote

    • Owned backend for Communication Center: omnichannel email, text, chat, and voice across the product suite.
    • Delivered conversation integration for the company’s first AI pilot: summaries, sentiment, and topic tracking on live threads.
    • Architected telephony event routing and reconciliation to work around third-party API limits.
  3. Software Engineer

    2018 – 2021

    Idaho National Laboratory · Idaho Falls, ID

    • Designed and built a nuclear material tracking application under NQA-1 quality assurance standards.
    • Established fine-grained security permissions and CI-backed server-side test automation for high-assurance software.
  4. Automation Engineer

    2017 – 2018

    Docutech · Idaho Falls, ID

    • Built a shared test-runner service used across every automation project in the organization.
    • Created release automation that saved hundreds of engineering hours per release.
  5. Software Engineer

    2016 – 2017

    Intel Security / McAfee · Remote

    • Built a Rails and AngularJS application that automated large-environment setup for continuous deployment.
    • Dockerized standardized test environments so teams could reproduce builds reliably.
  6. Mobile & Web Developer (part-time)

    2014 – 2015

    Brigham Young University-Idaho · Rexburg, ID

    • Led a mobile-first redesign of the university financial aid site.
    • Built native iOS and Android applications for campus use.

Where I go deep

AI & agents

  • Cursor / agentic development
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP)
  • LangChain / LangGraph
  • LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic)
  • AI code review tooling
  • Human-in-the-loop workflows
  • Evals & AI feedback loops

Backend & data

  • Ruby on Rails
  • Python / FastAPI
  • Node.js
  • PostgreSQL & Redis
  • Sidekiq & background processing
  • REST APIs

Platform & tools

  • TypeScript & React
  • Docker & CI/CD
  • GitHub Actions
  • AWS & Heroku
  • Observability (Papertrail, Rollbar)

Let’s talk

Open to senior engineering roles focused on AI systems, platform ownership, and high-leverage backend work.