Roy Hill-Percival

Atlanta, GA

Promoted from Senior Director of Engineering to take the AI-first model company-wide. Senior-most technology executive, reporting to the COO and presenting weekly to the C-suite and CEO; owns engineering, infrastructure, IT, and compliance.

• Rebuilt engineering around AI agents: 6 engineers, down from 30, now direct agents that write about 90% of the code, with fewer escaped defects, shorter cycle time, and roughly twice the merged-PR and feature throughput.
• Put 12 AI initiatives into production across five business units (support, operations, marketing, retail, and engineering), selected for high volume, a clear definition of a correct answer, and a safe human fallback.
• Moved first-line support to AI chat and real-time voice agents that resolve inquiries end to end, reducing support headcount 80% as the remaining staff became the agents' supervisors.
• Established company-wide AI governance policies, with every AI system inventoried, owned, and audited under SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001.
• Gate every agent release with LLM-as-judge evaluation suites and human PR review; a supervisor agent grades live conversations, and hosted models are A/B tested against quantized local models on quality, latency, and cost.
• Built an AIOps harness: agents watch Datadog, diagnose production issues, and open fix pull requests for human review, plus a daily anomaly review of transaction volumes.
• Cut projected annual infrastructure spend 50% through AI-driven ECS container placement and improved resource autoscaling strategies.

Miami, FL

Joined through Expedited Travel's acquisition of govWorks, whose platform replaced the company's legacy order-management system and became its core platform.

• Grew engineering from 10 to about 30 across six remote teams in the US and Latin America, led through principal and lead engineers with no engineering managers while staying hands-on with the core platform; reported to the COO.
• Migrated the company off Azure onto AWS and rebuilt the legacy system's B2B functionality into govWorks, retiring it in 2025.
• Expanded to visas for 180+ countries, corporate travel integrations (Salesforce, Concur, and others), AAA international driving permits, and a FedEx partnership in every FedEx Office location.
• Met a 2020 cost-cutting mandate by rebuilding the team in Latin America instead of shrinking it, holding about 30 engineers at much lower cost.
• Replaced a managed Elasticsearch cluster with a custom Redis search engine, cutting search cost 20x and latency from 200 ms to 10 ms.
• Launched the company's first production AI in 2025: RAG support agents gated by LLM-as-judge evals, MCP-based fulfillment agents, and A/B testing with staged rollouts and live traffic splits.
• Led the ML behind the product: a passport-photo pipeline (face framing, background removal, and a LoRA fine-tuned vision model checking each country's rules) powering the photo product in every Walgreens, plus identity-document extraction.
• Ran 24x7 multi-region AWS operations at thousands of requests per second (SLIs, SLOs, on-call, postmortems), continuously hardening a passport and identity-document platform that draws constant, evolving attacks.
• Stack: Claude Code, Cursor, MCP, Claude Agent SDK, LangGraph, Vercel AI SDK, LiveKit Agents, evals/LLM observability (Langfuse), pgvector, vLLM, MediaPipe, OpenCV, BiRefNet, ONNX, TypeScript, Python, PHP, Swift, Node.js, FastAPI, Laravel, Angular, Aurora MySQL/Postgres, Redis/Valkey, AWS, GCP, Azure, CloudFormation/CDK, GitHub Actions, Datadog.

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 from 4 to 10 by the acquisition, then to 30 at Expedited Travel, 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 LiveAnswer, a startup building a unifying operating system for contact centers, as Principal Software Engineer during its acquisition by Stericycle (Fortune 1000), and led the New York team that delivered the integration milestones the deal was tied to. Promoted to Director of Research & Development once the deal 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.