Troy Ingram, M.S.C.S.

Recent Work

EverDriven, Staff Engineer (Contract), March to June 2026

Architected a new authentication and authorization system for the core platform and built the early critical pieces before handing off to their team.

• Defined a defense-in-depth network topology in Kubernetes: a ForwardAuth gateway with header propagation, Backend-for-Frontend mediation, mTLS, and isolated Network Policies.
• Architected a decoupled identity structure, offloading external identity to the IdP while engineering a high-performance custom authorization service for complex RBAC.
• Designed and implemented core authentication services and RBAC/audit libraries in C#/.NET over PostgreSQL, satisfying SOC 2 and FERPA auditing requirements.

Independent Work, August 2025 to Present

I used the time between roles to go deep on applied AI. These are systems I built and still run.

• Built a self-hosted homelab from nothing to a CI/CD-deployed, reverse-proxied production-style environment on Proxmox VMs, a Docker ecosystem, and self-hosted GitLab pipelines.
• Designed and shipped JobFinder, an LLM-driven job-search platform (Python engine, FastAPI backend, React/TypeScript SPA) with batched LLM scoring against a written preference profile and a resume customizer constrained to never fabricate content.
• Built Interview Troy, a RAG system over a curated personal knowledge base. It is what the button at the top of this page opens.
• Engineered LLM cost control as a first-class design constraint: batching, prompt budgets, and per-run cost accounting to keep a fixed monthly credit pool viable.

Career Highlights

Helipass (PHI Aviation), from founding team to a $5M+ ARR business, across every layer of it: the architecture, the organization, the security program, the P&L.

• Selected in 2014 to found the engineering organization for a new offshore logistics business unit, growing it from 0 to 8 engineers and delivering Azure-based logistics, mobile, and data platforms.
• Promoted to director in 2021, growing the organization from 8 to 15 people across engineering and support while remaining principal architect.
• Owned the engineering operations budget, worked directly with the parent company's CFO and CTO, and sat in the business unit's senior leadership group alongside the president and business development.
• Served three months as interim president of the business unit while continuing to run engineering.
• Restructured the managed-services agreement for a roughly 30% reduction in operating cost with no loss of capability.
• Architected the modernization from monolith to microservices on domain-driven design and clean-architecture patterns, migrating Oracle to PostgreSQL and infrastructure onto a Docker container ecosystem.
• Improved release cadence from multi-week cycles to days, then to daily production deployments.
• Delivered secure SaaS operations with 99.9%+ availability and successful SOC 2 certification.
• Seeded the project management office, which spun off into an independent function and became engineering's critical delivery partner.
• Hired, mentored, and promoted engineers into senior, principal, and engineering management roles.
• Received the Exceptional Achievement Award (2018) for commercial product launch execution.
• Earlier, as a senior engineer from 2011 to 2014, cut development time by roughly 30% through open-source adoption, agile practices, and architectural refactoring.

How I Build Engineering Organizations

I treat organization design as engineering work: clear interfaces, clear ownership, and feedback loops that make the whole system stronger over time.

• Start with structure. Define team boundaries, system ownership, and decision rights so accountability is unambiguous.
• Hire for trajectory and ownership mindset, then set clear performance expectations from day one.
• Create operating cadence that teams can trust: planning, execution reviews, and retros that lead to concrete changes.
• Build technical leadership forums where architecture, standards, and tradeoffs are debated early and documented clearly.
• Run incidents as learning systems rather than blame systems, and translate lessons into standards and automation.
• Design cross-functional workflows with Product and Design so discovery, delivery, and support are connected end to end.
• Invest in career progression as a core responsibility: coaching plans, growth milestones, and promotion readiness.

Technical Depth

I have stayed hands-on in every role I have held. These are the tools I work in directly.

Operating Model

First 90 Days

What I would expect to have in place by the end of the first quarter.

• Clear engineering ownership boundaries and decision rights across platform domains.
• A consistent operating cadence for planning, delivery reviews, and follow-through that teams can rely on.
• The recurring bottlenecks in planning, handoffs, and technical dependencies identified and being removed.
• Explicit standards for production readiness, observability, and incident learning.
• A concrete plan for leadership capacity covering coaching, hiring, and promotion readiness.

Education & Development

• M.S., Computer Science, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Completed while working full time.
• B.S., Computer Science, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2006.
• Leadership development and business acumen, Center for Creative Leadership.
• Leadership development, Dale Carnegie.