Bradley Allan Davis

AI-Native Senior Software Engineer

Summary

Senior backend engineer with 7+ years building scalable, event-driven payment and platform systems in Java, Spring, and Kafka. Now builds on that foundation with MCP servers and agentic development workflows that put AI to work in real systems. Has led shared-platform libraries, fee calculation, and the largest architectural initiative in a multi-region fiat payments platform. Four years on a global fiat payments platform spanning 30+ payment providers across APAC, EU, and the US. Runs a five-machine, Nix-managed homelab with self-hosted infrastructure as a daily proving ground for new tooling.

AI Engineering

Agent Tooling & Automation
Agentic Dev Workflows
MCP Server Authoring

Experience

OKX — Senior Software Engineer — Fiat Payments Platform

Mar 2022 — May 2026

Remote, USA

Led Project Catalyst, the platform's largest architectural effort, decomposing the payment-orchestration monolith into five independently deployable modules with semver-governed contracts, enabling parallel team ownership and lower-risk releases.
Drove team adoption of AI-assisted development, using agentic coding tools for large-scale work including a JUnit 5 migration across ~1,100 test files and the Catalyst decomposition.
Built the shared payments library from scratch as tech lead (Temporal workflows, alerting, notifications, OpenTelemetry, core utilities), adopted platform-wide.
Built the platform's internal and external reconciliation engines: Kafka-based event processing, multi-region scheduling, 1-to-N status mapping, and automated alerting, reconciling millions of transactions across all payment providers.
Designed and shipped a global payment fee-calculation service from conception to production, with composable fee criteria (currency, entity, user type, channel, method, transaction type) and components (flat, tiered, percentage), that underpinned every payment integration going forward and runs live serving DBS Singapore channels.
Authored a Maven code-generation plugin for provider-integration boilerplate, cutting setup time by over 50% and letting junior engineers onboard new providers independently.
Redesigned the counterparty funding-exposure check, reducing the effort to add it to new integrations by over 80%.
Built OpenPayd, the first channel on a new payment-gateway architecture (signature verification, account/deposit/withdrawal flows, Kafka events), establishing patterns the platform still relies on.
Bootstrapped a Web3 card platform from inception: Temporal workflows, card authorization and funding, and transaction APIs.

Intuit — Software Engineer — QuickBooks Developer Ecosystem

Feb 2019 — Feb 2022

Remote, USA

Led webhooks processing infrastructure handling 10-20M daily notifications, powering real-time data sync for thousands of SMB customers and third-party developers at 99.9% reliability.
Extended the webhooks ecosystem across QuickBooks Online, Revenue Platform, and Payroll domain events, powering QBO Advanced's launch.
Implemented distributed tracing across all webhooks services, surfacing performance bottlenecks and speeding incident triage across the notification pipeline.

Selected Projects

Nix Control Plane. A single declarative Nix repo managing five machines (macOS and NixOS), secrets, networking, and home automation. AI agents edit and deploy it daily; preflight guards abort any remote deploy from a dirty or unpushed tree.

Self-Hosted Homelab. Self-hosted git (Forgejo) behind a Caddy reverse proxy, DNS (Pi-hole), Home Assistant, and a media stack, backed by ZFS-replicated storage with restic backups and monitored via Prometheus and Grafana across a UniFi network.

MCP Servers. 10+ Model Context Protocol servers (authored and hardened third-party) exposing home, finance, and infrastructure systems as agent-callable tools, with permission-scoped writes and tamper-monitored credential reads.

bdavis.ai. A from-scratch personal site and writing home built with Astro, documenting agentic-engineering and infrastructure work.

Skills

AI Tooling: Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, Anthropic API, Cursor, ChatGPT, Gemini

Backend: Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, MySQL, Redis, Temporal, REST APIs

Distributed Systems: Event-Driven, Microservices, Multi-Region, Idempotency, Reconciliation

Cloud & Infra: AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, NixOS, Linux

DevOps: CI/CD, Git, GitHub/GitLab, ArgoCD, GitOps, Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana

Domains: Financial Systems, Payments, Fintech, Accounting

Leadership: Tech Lead, System Design, Mentoring, Code Review

Education

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Sep 2015 — Dec 2018

M.S. — Computer Science · Madison, WI

Distributed Systems, Machine Learning, Big Data Systems, Advanced Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Artificial Intelligence, Databases

Beyond the Keyboard

Eagle Scout, saved a life with CPR, former oilfield MWD field engineer and ski instructor.