Roy Hill-Percival

Atlanta, GA

Promoted from Senior Director of Engineering to lead the company's AI-first transformation across engineering, operations, customer support, and fulfillment.

• Lead the engineering organization as the company's senior-most technology executive, reporting directly to the COO.
• Present technology and AI-transformation progress weekly to company leadership, from VPs and the C-suite to the CEO/founder.
• Established company-wide AI usage and governance policies while maintaining SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance.
• Transitioned engineering to an AI-first organization: the majority of development is executed by AI agents under the direction of 3 engineers, down from 15 (an 80% reduction), shipping roughly twice the merged-PR and feature throughput of the larger team; moving the work directly under the people with the product vision eliminates layers of handoff and delivers faster iteration with fewer escaped defects.
• Scaled the AI support platform to real-time voice: agents resolve inquiries and automate call handling end to end, reducing headcount needs across operations and customer support.
• Gate agent quality with LLM-as-judge evaluation suites and a supervisor agent for continuous AI observability; A/B test agent and model changes across hosted and quantized local models with staged rollouts and live traffic splits.
• Built an AIOps harness for agentic incident response: agents monitor Datadog for production issues, diagnose root causes, propose fixes as pull requests, and report each investigation into Discord.
• Cut projected annual infrastructure spend 50%, with AI agents driving resource consolidation and ECS container-placement optimization.
• Stack: TypeScript, Node.js, Python, AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, LangChain/MCP.

Miami, FL

Joined through Expedited Travel's acquisition of govWorks; continued to lead the govWorks platform within Expedited Travel.

• Led 15 engineers across 3 fully remote teams spanning the US and Latin America (one hands-on, the others through a principal engineer and an engineering manager), reporting directly to the COO.
• Integrated govWorks technology into Expedited Travel's platform and expanded automated visa support across many new countries.
• Built the first version of the in-house AI customer-support platform in 2025: chat agents grounded in company knowledge with RAG (embeddings + vector search), gated by an automated LLM-as-judge evaluation suite comparing responses against expected outputs.
• Deployed the company's first back-office AI agents assisting order fulfillment, built on MCP tool/function calling with schema-validated structured outputs.
• A/B tested model and feature changes with offline eval suites, staged rollouts, and live traffic splits, balancing quality against latency, throughput, and cost.
• Led an ML/AI system that captures passport-style photos with automatic framing and cropping, validating them against each country's compliance requirements in real time with a LoRA fine-tuned vision model.
• Delivered AI-driven review analysis, automated customer outreach, and continuous reputation monitoring.
• Built AI/ML document-scanning that extracts data from identity documents (e.g., driver's licenses), detecting, cropping, and parsing key fields to streamline application processing.
• Ran 24x7 operations of large, fault-tolerant, multi-region AWS environments handling thousands of requests per second.
• Owned SRE practices for the platform: defined SLIs/SLOs, ran on-call incident management with blameless postmortems, and used reliability data to pace releases.
• Stack: Angular, React, TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, LangChain/MCP.

Miami, FL · Acquired by Expedited Travel

Founding architect: designed govWorks with its founder through 2017, ahead of its January 2018 launch; then built and led the engineering team and held a stake through the acquisition. govWorks let users apply for vital documents such as passports and visas with the tap of a button, as a registered courier with the U.S. Department of State and through direct integrations with municipal governments and foreign consulates.

• Led the engineering vision, system architecture, scalability, and security through to acquisition.
• Represented engineering in technical due diligence for the acquisition by Expedited Travel.
• Architected a standardized Data Vault enabling any form to be filled from a single source of information via a mapping structure.
• Designed an Automation Engine that automates any website, fills any PDF/document, and streams real-time feedback over WebSocket, submitting applications with no user intervention.
• Built automated CI/CD powering a distributed Docker-based (AWS ECS) infrastructure across staging and production.
• Shipped iOS & Android apps for couriers and document-resolution teams.
• Developed unified checkout funnels and a CRM/order-management platform.
• Grew the team to 30 engineers at peak, alongside product designers and QA (led through lead and principal engineers across backend, frontend, iOS, Android, DevOps, and infrastructure).
• Stack: Angular, TypeScript, Node.js, AWS (ECS), Docker, WebSockets.

New York, NY

Joined when Stericycle (Fortune 1000) acquired LiveAnswer, a unifying operating system for contact centers, to lead the New York team delivering the integration milestones the deal was tied to; promoted to Director of R&D after it fully closed in 2017.

• Led the New York engineering team that built the majority of the feature set required under the acquisition agreement, and supported technical due diligence through its close.
• Built call-flow services and an IVR on Twilio, with pager-notification support.
• Built real-time agent-assist and conversational analytics for contact-center agents: AI sentiment analysis and bi-directional machine translation (IBM Watson) for multi-language voice support, later expanded into live-call intelligence (intent detection, sentiment, and speech translation) across Stericycle's contact-center platforms.
• Integrated and consolidated Stericycle's disparate legacy contact-center systems, some running on mainframes and DOS.
• As Director of R&D, prototyped advanced tech (machine learning, WebRTC, PNaCl, WebAssembly) and transitioned validated proofs of concept to core engineering.
• Met strict security and regulatory needs (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001) with product, compliance, and stakeholders.
• Mentored engineers and attracted/retained top software-engineering and R&D talent.
• Stack: Laravel (PHP), Angular, Node.js (TypeScript), Twilio, IBM Watson, WebRTC, PNaCl/WebAssembly, GCP, Azure.

New York, NY

Wickr (acquired by AWS) pioneered ephemeral, end-to-end encrypted messaging and real-time encrypted video, audio, and text collaboration. Joined as the first dedicated backend/platform hire, taking over the backend built by the CTO and reporting directly to the CTO.

• Patented a means of delivering cryptographically secure real-time events to applications: Switchboard, prototyped in Node.js, rebuilt in Erlang/OTP for its concurrency model, and ported to Rust for production.
• Migrated a legacy RESTful LAMP messaging system on dedicated hardware to an event-driven, low-latency microservices platform on AWS serving millions of users in real time (Node.js WebSockets/Express, Redis, Cassandra, RabbitMQ).
• Designed a real-time API driving multiple client platforms atop the cryptographic communication protocol.
• Proposed and demonstrated crypto-protocol improvements supporting consensus features.
• Built a secure REST API powering the enterprise product's admin portal (Node.js).
• Implemented a distributed real-time analytics system (RabbitMQ, Node, MySQL stat-binning).
• Wrote core hashing in C as a PHP extension to speed proprietary hashing in the legacy system.
• Designed and ran 4 AWS environments, 2 at production scale.
• Stack: Node.js, Rust, C, PHP, Redis, Cassandra, RabbitMQ, MySQL, AWS.

Newark, NJ

iSpeech built speech-recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and natural-language understanding (NLU) products powering consumer apps and third-party developers. Joined full-time while completing my B.S., scheduling classes around work hours.

• Built speech-side systems: a viseme generator for lip-sync, audio-labeling tools for training data, and core voice-cloning technology.
• Designed, built, and secured infrastructure analyzing statistics for a new social platform.
• Designed and deployed a distributed video-encoding system.
• Maintained and expanded a 23+ node Cassandra cluster and ensured proper operation of its Solr indexer.
• Designed APIs, plus their server cluster and networking environment, for third-party developers.
• Built full-stack Symfony apps and APIs in PHP and Hack on HHVM, distributed across many servers.
• Designed a distributed load-balancer (HAProxy + Stunnel) for an nginx-based cluster.
• Stack: ZeroMQ, RabbitMQ, Redis, Cassandra, Solr, HAProxy, Jenkins, NDBCluster.

Newark, NJ

University work experience held alongside my B.S. in Computer Science.

• Selected for NJIT's STARS reverse-mentoring program, pairing skilled student developers with faculty.
• Built working technology projects and taught them hands-on to Computer Science faculty, across a rotating set of technologies chosen each cycle.

Miami, FL

Founded a collective of senior engineers serving companies from startups to Fortune 500 and led its early growth through hands-on consulting. The advisory board seat required a few hours per quarter with no operational involvement.

• VPN app and platform in Tauri (Rust): one core shipping native apps across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android with native OS networking modules, backed by a globally distributed, WireGuard-based node network with XTLS Reality/Vision support, plus a Stripe-integrated customer website and portal.
• Live remote-training video platform: on-demand transcoding, iOS/Android apps, and Chromecast casting.
• Unified dental-practice API with bidirectional practice-management integrations and an embedded Raspberry Pi CM sync gateway reverse-tunneling on-prem systems to the cloud.
• Direct-mail marketing SaaS platform with a Docker-on-Lambda print-rendering pipeline serving thousands of TLS-secured customer landing pages.
• Product-analytics platform on a Neo4j graph model: data pipelines feeding interactive dashboards that surface product usage and business metrics.
• Stack (across these and other engagements): Rust, Tauri, TypeScript/Node.js, GraphQL, Neo4j, React, AWS.