Daniel Noel
Fractional CTO · Cloud Architect · AI Engineer · Founder
Summary
Builder, tinkerer, and operator who has been writing code since age 10. Two decades of launching startups, scaling platforms to millions of users, and shipping cutting-edge AI: voice sales agents, live AI coaching, RAG pipelines, and production knowledge bases. I care about building AI responsibly, keeping user data private, designing for measured outcomes, and knowing when a simpler solution serves people better than a complex one.
Ventures
Founder & Fractional CTO — Loji.us
Austin, TX · 2014 – Present
- Founded Loji as a consulting and product studio; grown continuously for over a decade.
- Fractional CTO engagements pair deep technical execution with strategic leadership for early- and growth-stage companies.
- Current AI practice: voice sales agents, real-time AI agent coaching, RAG / knowledge-base systems, and custom LLM integrations for clients across multiple verticals.
- Expanded scope in 2024–25 to serve a larger roster of clients, treating each engagement as a true cofounder relationship.
Co-Founder & CTO — Ashore App
Georgetown, TX · 2019 – Present
- Built everything from the ground up: all cloud infrastructure, backend API, and frontend client. Still running a decade later at $300K ARR.
- Navigated a strategic partnership with Function Point and integrated deeply into their systems.
- Built and led the dev team, established engineering process, and scaled the platform to thousands of active users.
- Engineered automated SSL provisioning tool that interfaces with Kubernetes and the main API to ensure paid users receive custom SSL configurations without delay.
- Integrated PDF, video, and audio processing pipelines into the core product.
Founder — TavernScribe.com
Remote · 2024 – Present
- Spearheaded the conception, build, and launch of TavernScribe — a new product at the intersection of AI and tabletop gaming.
- Led all technical architecture decisions and built the first production version of the platform.
Professional Experience
Cloud Engineering Team Lead & Sr. Software Engineer — Chatbooks
Lehi, UT · 2016 – 2024
- Architected and operated a production Kubernetes environment handling millions of users; ARM-based node pools cut compute costs dramatically.
- Built a custom autoscaler (Kubernetes + AWS Auto Scaling Groups) driven by custom business metrics, not just CPU/memory.
- Deployed full observability stack: ELK APM, Prometheus, Grafana, and an on-call alerting system that pages the engineer on duty for high-severity events.
- Built a secrets loader for .NET and Python that pulls Vault secrets at container runtime based on Kubernetes RBAC grants, with zero secrets stored in environment variables.
- Deployed and operated advanced CI/CD pipeline; configured Redis, Vault, Velero, and Cert-Manager as core platform services.
- Trained, deployed, and served a photo-ranking ML model to intelligently group photos for end users.
- Upgraded multiple core .NET Framework services to .NET 7 and containerized them for Kubernetes.
- Stood up private package repositories for Python, .NET, and JavaScript; configured rate limiting for all public-facing APIs.
Sr. Software Engineer — GoMedigap
Round Rock, TX · 2013 – 2016
- Led all technical aspects of the business: infrastructure, vendors, tooling, hiring, architecture, and delivery.
- Built a custom CRM and lead-management system; integrated a PBX voice system directly into the CRM.
- Real-time WebSocket system distributed inbound leads to available sales reps in under a second.
- Built a real-time lead-buying engine driven by configurable rules and live metrics; dynamic voicemail-drop system saved reps hours per day.
- Deployed office heads-up displays with rotating KPIs and live team contest leaderboards; built a lighting system that signaled reps when live leads were in the queue.
- Designed all analytics data structures and contributed to executive reporting; implemented PGP encryption across the private NAS.
- Built A/B testable lead generation pages and NPS tracking systems to continuously measure outcomes and iterate based on real user signal, not assumptions.
Software Engineer — Atomic Axis
Austin, TX · 2012 – 2013
- Architected and developed software for multiple clients; deployed and administered CI/CD pipeline.
Software & Electrical Engineer — Force X Design
Austin, TX · 2011 – 2012
- Full ownership of an IoT command-and-control system for oil well pumps and tanks: custom hardware, networking, API, client apps, and sensors — every layer of the stack.
Software Engineer — Texas Tech Health Science Center
Lubbock, TX · 2010 – 2012
- Built a scheduling tool to manage the dynamic availability of student workers across the center.
AI & Emerging Technology
- Voice sales agents: production AI agents that handle inbound and outbound sales calls with real-time STT, LLM reasoning, and TTS.
- Live AI agent coaching: systems that monitor live sales calls and surface real-time coaching cards to reps without interrupting the conversation.
- RAG & knowledge bases: retrieval-augmented generation systems backed by vector databases (Redis Vector DB, pgvector) for multiple client knowledge bases.
- LLM integrations: GPT-4o function-calling agents embedded in Slack for unified company AI interfaces; custom fine-tuning and prompt pipelines for domain-specific tasks.
- Custom LLM training: fine-tuned and built custom LLMs trained entirely on proprietary client data, keeping sensitive information fully in-house with zero exposure to third-party model providers.
- Custom model training: built and trained custom ML models to score complex non-linear relationships into clean reductive scores, enabling business logic to act on nuanced signal without manual analysis.
- Privacy-preserving AI: designed and deployed AI systems with data privacy as a first-class constraint, including on-premise inference and architectures that never expose user data to external APIs.
- ML model lifecycle: trained image classification networks, ran high-capacity inference workloads, and converted models for TensorFlow and CoreML deployment.
Core Skills
- Languages: C#, Python, Go, C, C++, JavaScript (React, Vue, Angular), Swift, PHP, Assembly, Bash, PowerShell, Rust, Ruby on Rails.
- AI / ML: LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic), RAG pipelines, vector DBs, voice agents, PyTorch, TF, CoreML, image classification.
- Cloud: AWS (VPC, EC2, ECS, RDS, S3, Lambda, CloudFront, IAM, Route 53, SQS, SNS, CloudWatch), GCP, Azure, Vercel.
- Kubernetes & containers: Kubernetes (deploy, secure, monitor, custom autoscaling), Docker, Helm, vSphere, VirtualBox, Docker Swarm.
- Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis (Cache + Vector), Cassandra, Snowflake.
- Observability: ELK Stack (APM, Kibana, Filebeat), Prometheus, Grafana, custom metric injectors, on-call alerting.
- Networking & security: OSI 1–7, TLS/SSL, VPN, OAUTH, gRPC, WebSockets, Vault, Falco, Cert-Manager, PGP, Sn1per.
- CI/CD & DevOps: GitHub Actions, TeamCity, Jenkins, Helm, Octodeploy, private Docker registries, ECS.
- Media & rendering: FFMPEG, ImageSharp, server-side PDF rendering, 3D (Unity, Unreal).
- ETL & data: Pipelinewise, Snowflake, full analytics data design.
Education
Texas Tech University — Software Engineering
2010 – 2012
Austin Community College — Web Development
2007 – 2010