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Karey Powell

Staff Engineer & AI Systems Architect

I build production AI systems and scale fintech platforms: 14+ years across credit bureaus, lending, payments and enterprise software.

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Location and local time
Kingston, Jamaica
Availability
Open to remote roles and consulting

About

For 14 years I've built the systems money moves through: credit bureaus, lending platforms, banking and payments. Now I put AI into them, with the cost controls, observability and latency budgets production demands.

Where I can help

  • Put AI into production

    Voice agents, RAG pipelines and document intelligence, shipped with fallbacks, cost controls and observability instead of left as prototypes.

  • Architect fintech platforms

    Lending, credit bureau and payments systems: service boundaries, data models and integrations designed for real transaction volume.

  • Make slow systems fast

    Measurement-first performance work on live platforms. I cut a credit bureau's API response times by 50% without a rewrite.

  • Lead the technical side

    Technical strategy, architecture reviews, due diligence and vendor evaluation, and building engineering teams from zero.

Results in production

Outcomes and design targets from systems I designed, built or led.

  • −50%API response time on Jamaica's credit bureau platformEveryData, 2022–24
  • 3×Peak query volume handled without degradationEveryData, 2022–24
  • 0Records lost migrating millions of consumer credit recordsEveryData, 2022–24
  • 25+Financial institutions on a lending platform I co-foundedLoanCirrus, 2016–21
  • 99.9%Uptime for real-time transaction processingLoanCirrus, 2016–21
  • <90sBuilt to qualify and route an inbound call with an AI voice agentAI voice agents
  • 30+AI phone agents live in production, managed from one operator platform I builtAI voice agents
  • 60%Operational efficiency gain from an inventory platform built from scratchRemote Rocket, 2018–22

AI systems in production

Designed and shipped under real constraints, with the latency, cost and failure handling that live traffic demands.

Voice AI

AI voice call agents

Built the call engine and operator platform behind 30+ live AI phone agents for home-services brands. Calls are routed by the number dialed, screened in three questions, then transferred or politely closed, with each brand's prompt versioned and deployed on its own.

30+ live agents on one operator platform

  • Vapi
  • GPT-4o
  • Deepgram Nova-3
  • ElevenLabs
  • Fastify
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
Read the build notes

How it works

  1. Inbound call
  2. Twilio SIP
  3. Route by number
  4. 3-question screen
  5. Transfer or close

LLM services

Document intelligence

Built LLM-integrated microservices for automated document parsing, resume analysis and structured data extraction.

Thousands of documents a day at sub-second latency

  • LLMs
  • Microservices
  • Python
  • Node.js

How it works

  1. Documents in
  2. Parse
  3. LLM extraction
  4. Structured data

Retrieval

RAG pipelines

Designed and deployed RAG pipelines that combine vector search with relational data sources for context-aware AI responses in production applications.

Vector and relational context in one answer

  • pgvector
  • Pinecone
  • PostgreSQL

How it works

  1. Question
  2. Vector search
  3. Relational data
  4. LLM
  5. Context-aware answer

Quality assurance

Real-time call scoring

Implemented real-time call scoring and classification with LLMs, automating quality assurance across customer service operations.

Automated QA across customer service

  • LLMs
  • Classification
  • Real-time

How it works

  1. Live call
  2. Transcript
  3. LLM classifier
  4. QA score

Integration

Production AI integration

Integrated AI services into Laravel, Node.js and Python production systems with proper cost controls, fallback handling, observability and latency budgets.

Budgets and fallbacks on every model call

  • Laravel
  • Node.js
  • Python

How it works

  1. Your service
  2. Cost controls
  3. Model call
  4. Fallbacks
  5. Observability

Experience

From founding teams to staff-level architecture: fourteen years of production systems across the Caribbean.

  1. Feb 2025 to Present, Kingston, Jamaica

    Lead Solutions Architect

    MZ Holdings Ltd.

    Fintech platform building AI-integrated financial services and data processing systems.

    • Lead system architecture and design for a fintech platform — defining service boundaries, API contracts, data models, and integration patterns across payments, data processing, and third-party systems
    • Drive AI and machine learning integration into the platform — designing intelligent automation features that enhance financial data processing and decision-making workflows
    • Own technical solution design end-to-end: from stakeholder requirements through architecture proposals, implementation oversight, and production deployment in a cloud-native environment
    • Go
    • Python
    • TypeScript
    • AWS
    • PostgreSQL
    • Docker
    • Kubernetes

  2. Aug 2022 to Sep 2024, Kingston, Jamaica

    Senior Software Engineer

    EveryData Jamaica Ltd.

    Jamaica's leading credit bureau providing comprehensive credit information services.

    • Redesigned core microservices for Jamaica's credit bureau platform, cutting API response times by 50% and enabling the system to handle 3x peak query volume without degradation
    • Built and shipped RESTful APIs in Go, C#, and TypeScript that integrated with 30+ third-party data providers, improving integration onboarding time by 30%
    • Led data migration and reconciliation efforts for legacy credit systems, ensuring zero data loss across millions of consumer credit records
    • Drove system architecture decisions across the platform — established patterns for service decomposition, caching strategy, and security hardening that became team standards
    • Go
    • TypeScript
    • Python
    • C#
    • Docker
    • Kubernetes
    • AWS
    • PostgreSQL
    • MongoDB
    • Redis

  3. Nov 2018 to Jul 2022, Kingston, Jamaica

    Chief Technology Officer

    Remote Rocket Ltd.

    Technology consultancy delivering cloud-based systems to SMB clients across logistics, retail, and professional services.

    • Defined and executed technical strategy for a consultancy delivering cloud-based systems to SMB clients across logistics, retail, and professional services
    • Architected and delivered an inventory management platform from scratch that increased client operational efficiency by 60%, processing 10K+ SKUs across multiple warehouses
    • Led technical discovery, solution architecture, and delivery for 15+ client engagements — scoping projects, managing timelines, and shipping production systems
    • Built and mentored a development team of 5 engineers, establishing code review processes, CI/CD pipelines, and architectural standards
    • PHP
    • Laravel
    • Python
    • TypeScript
    • MySQL
    • AWS
    • Docker

  4. Nov 2016 to Dec 2021, Kingston, Jamaica

    Co-Founder & Lead Engineer

    LoanCirrus Ltd.

    FinTech SaaS platform for loan management serving financial institutions across the Caribbean.

    • Co-founded and architected a loan management SaaS platform from zero to serving 25+ financial institutions across multiple Caribbean markets
    • Designed and built the core platform: loan origination workflows, payment processing integrations, risk scoring, portfolio management, and regulatory reporting
    • Built and operated AWS infrastructure (ECS, Aurora, S3, SQS) supporting real-time transaction processing with 99.9% uptime across production environments
    • Created automation tooling for deployments, database migrations, and data reconciliation that reduced release cycles from weeks to hours
    • PHP
    • Laravel
    • Vue.js
    • AWS (ECS, Aurora, S3, SQS)
    • MySQL
    • Redis

  5. May 2012 to Nov 2016, Jamaica

    Director & CTO

    SpiderCentro Inc.

    Enterprise architecture and API development for banking and payments platforms across Caribbean financial institutions.

    • Led enterprise architecture and API development for banking and payments platforms deployed across Caribbean financial institutions
    • Architected custom solutions for diverse business verticals including banking, e-commerce, healthcare, and government services
    • Managed technical recruiting, team development, and client consulting — grew the engineering function from founding to a productive delivery team
    • PHP
    • JavaScript
    • MySQL
    • PostgreSQL
    • AWS

Toolkit

The languages, platforms and practices behind the work above.

Systems & Architecture

  • Distributed Systems
  • Microservices
  • Event-Driven Architecture
  • Domain-Driven Design
  • API Design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC)
  • System Design at Scale

AI & Data Engineering

  • LLM Integration (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude)
  • RAG Pipelines
  • AI Agents
  • Real-Time Scoring & Classification
  • Document Intelligence
  • Vector Search
  • Prompt Engineering

Cloud & Infrastructure

  • AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS, S3, SQS, CloudFormation)
  • GCP
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • CI/CD
  • Observability (Datadog, CloudWatch)

Languages & Frameworks

  • Go
  • Python
  • PHP (Laravel)
  • TypeScript
  • Node.js
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Vue.js

Data

  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL/Aurora
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • Elasticsearch
  • SQL Server

Leadership

  • Technical Strategy
  • Team Building (0 to 5+)
  • Architecture Reviews
  • Cross-Functional Execution
  • Vendor Evaluation
  • Technical Due Diligence

Writing

Notes on shipping AI in production, scaling fintech platforms, and the architecture decisions behind them.

All writing

Let's build something that holds up.

kareypowell@gmail.com
Email me

Based in Kingston, Jamaica. Open to remote roles globally and strategic consulting engagements. Especially interested in fintech infrastructure, AI-powered financial services, and production AI systems.

Phone
(876) 442-5402
LinkedIn
karey-powell
GitHub
kareypowell
Resume
PDF, 2026