Stephen Solka

About Stephen Solka

Engineer and technical leader with 19 years of experience building production software systems. Co-founded and built an AI-powered document analysis platform as sole engineer — designing the full stack from LLM orchestration and ML inference services through distributed backend systems to cloud infrastructure. Three years of hands-on experience building and operating agentic AI workflows at scale, including multi-model routing, prompt chain design, and tool-use orchestration.Daily practitioner of agentic AI development — averaging 250+ Claude Code sessions per month, shipping production code across the full infrastructure stack from Terraform and Flux deployments to Go/Elixir application debugging and production incident response. Runs multiple parallel agent sessions simultaneously, maintaining architectural control while delegating execution across 5+ repositories in a single workflow.Prior experience leading engineering organizations up to 30 people, with a strong preference for staying close to the code. Self-taught, started building and never stopped.

Experience

1. Chief Technology Officer, Co-founder

   Standd

   Aug 2022 — Present

   Built an AI-powered due diligence and deal review platform from scratch as sole engineer and co-founder, serving legal and PE/VC firms. Owned the full product lifecycle — from user-facing application through agentic AI systems, production ML services, distributed backend, and cloud infrastructure.Designed and operated multi-model LLM orchestration across Claude, Gemini, and Nova with intelligent routing, prompt caching, and 20+ domain-specific prompt chains. Built 4 production ML microservices for document understanding tasks including citation scoring, topic modeling, and classification. Architected the full distributed backend in Go and Elixir — Temporal workflows, NATS messaging, multi-tenant auth — and deployed 22+ services on Kubernetes via GitOps with zero static credentials.Three years building AI systems in production — not prototypes, not demos — real multi-tenant software handling 100M+ document paragraphs for paying customers.Daily practitioner of agentic AI development — averaging 250+ Claude Code sessions and 170K+ messages per month, shipping production code across the full infrastructure stack from Terraform and Flux deployments to Go/Elixir application debugging. Runs multiple parallel agent sessions simultaneously, maintaining architectural control while delegating execution across 5+ repositories in a single workflow.

Skills

• Scala
• Angularjs
• Eclipse
• Agile Methodologies
• Design Patterns
• Databases
• Spring
• Ejb
• Git
• Javascript
• Node.js
• Subversion
• Ivy
• Mysql
• Distributed Systems
• React.js
• Groovy
• Ant
• Sass
• Continuous Integration
• Software Development
• Scrum
• Objective-C
• Perl
• Junit
• Typescript
• Iphone Development
• Open Source
• Maven
• Sql
• Gruntjs
• Hibernate
• Jpa
• Grails
• Ruby on Rails
• Xml
• Rest
• Gwt
• Xcode
• Java