Bradley Allan Davis
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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
Experience
OKX — Senior Software Engineer — Fiat Payments Platform
Mar 2022 — May 2026- Led Project Catalyst, the largest architectural effort in the platform's history, decomposing the payment-orchestration monolith into five independently deployable modules with semver-governed DTO contracts, enabling decoupled team ownership, parallel development, and lower-risk releases.
- Drove the team's adoption of AI-assisted development, using agentic coding tools to deliver large-scale work including a JUnit 5 migration across roughly 1,100 test files and the Catalyst module decomposition.
- Built the shared payments library from the ground up as tech lead (Temporal workflow infrastructure, alerting, customer notifications, OpenTelemetry, and core utilities), adopted by every service across the payments platform.
- Designed and built the platform's internal and external reconciliation engines: Kafka-based event processing with multi-region scheduling, 1-to-N status mapping, and automated alerting, reconciling millions of transactions across all payment-provider integrations.
- 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 the OpenPayd integration as the first channel on a new payment-gateway architecture (webhook signature verification, account creation, deposit and withdrawal flows, Kafka events), establishing integration patterns still used today.
- 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- 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 the launch of QBO Advanced.
- 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.
MCP Servers. 10+ Model Context Protocol servers in daily use, spanning authored (things-turbo, published) and hardened third-party, exposing home, finance, and infrastructure systems as agent-callable tools. Write paths are permission-scoped and credential reads are tamper-monitored.
Self-Hosted Homelab. Bitcoin and Lightning node, Pi-hole DNS, Home Assistant, and ZFS replication with restic backups across a UniFi network. Monitored with Prometheus and Grafana; agents operate the stack day to day through the same MCP layer.
bdavis.ai. A from-scratch personal site and writing home built with Astro, documenting agentic-engineering and infrastructure work.
Skills
Education
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sep 2015 — Dec 2018Distributed 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.