Open to interesting roles

Lead Software & AI Engineer

Justin Barias.

I build the platforms, tooling, and practices that take AI agents from experiment to production.

Read the writing Get in touch
justin@dewr: ~
whoami
> Justin Barias — Lead Software & AI Engineer
 
cat about.md
# I take AI agents from experiment to production.
# Loop: evaluate → descend → ship.

Lead Software & AI Engineer

Justin Barias

I tune platforms the way you tune a model: evaluate, then descend toward the minimum.

Read the writing Get in touch
01 — Availability $ ./status // availability

Currently open to the right opportunity. Here's what fits:

  • Engagement Contract (12-month minimum) or full-time
  • Level Principal / Lead Software & AI Engineering
  • The work Genuinely tackling core business problems with AI engineering — not POC theatre
  • Good fit Teams needing lead/principal depth on distributed systems and AI workloads
02 — About $ cat about.md // about
Portrait of Justin Barias

AI engineering leader who builds the platforms, tooling, and practices that take AI agents from experiment to production. Deep roots in DevOps, SRE, and distributed systems — I pivoted to AI at Microsoft (LLMs, copilots, RAG) and now lead AI-native platform engineering in Australian government.

I'm the creator of HoloDeck, an open-source YAML-driven agent platform, and I work at every layer: architecture, engineering, evaluation, observability, and shipping to production.

03 — Experience $ git log --oneline ~/experience // experience · run history
  1. 2025 — Present Contract

    Lead Software & AI Engineer

    Contract

    Innovation Team · Dept. of Employment and Workplace Relations

    • Built a secure, developer-native AI experimentation platform rated for Protected data on Azure AI Foundry
    • Developed a .NET LLM experimentation engine — a federal-government first for end-to-end agent experimentation, evaluation, OpenTelemetry, and production deployment; cut time-to-production by 60%
    • Shipped two production LLM workloads and lead the department's AI-native software engineering strategy
    • Lead a team of 8 across internal tooling, libraries, and an Azure developer platform
  2. 2024 — 2025 Contract

    Lead Software Engineer

    Contract

    Digital Delivery · Dept. of Employment and Workplace Relations

    • Led a cross-cutting systems team accelerating delivery for 6 engineering teams on a $30M distributed payments system for higher education and schools
    • Built scalable platforms for distributed services with a focus on observability, messaging, and transactional integrity
    • Led cross-functional engineering teams
  3. 2020 — 2024

    Senior Consultant — Software Engineering & AI

    Microsoft Australia

    • Led LLM proof-of-concept work for internal tools — Semantic Kernel, Azure OpenAI, and RAG in a .NET Blazor app — through to MVP release
    • Led a sustainability data-ingestion platform for a top Australian telco: ETL, emissions calculations, Python data engineering, and dashboards
    • Shipped internal cloud-migration tooling (ASP.NET Core, Blazor) to 5 live projects globally across a distributed team
    • Delivered cloud operating-model and GRC platforms for federal government and a top-3 Australian bank
  4. 2018 — 2020

    Premier Field Engineer — Modern Apps & DevOps/SRE

    Microsoft Australia

    • Engineered an Azure onboarding platform for a leading Australian bank: custom tooling, telemetry, and cloud-native distributed services
    • Wrote custom Terraform Azure modules in Go and built serverless, event-driven ingestion pipelines in C# .NET Core
    • Led build & release pipeline transformation for a federal department — 40+ agile teams, 60+ applications
  5. 2017 — 2018

    Site Reliability Engineering Lead

    MedicalDirector

    • Transformed release pipelines to single-click; drove cloud cost optimisation and automation
    • Applied domain-driven design and cloud-native architecture for healthcare SaaS, enabling blue-green / red-black deployments
  6. 2016 — 2017

    Senior Cloud Consultant

    Readify

    • Led the DevOps practice across the organisation
    • Defined distributed cloud architecture and CI/CD for the online platform of Australia's largest retailer
04 — Projects $ ls ~/projects // projects · builds

  1. HoloDeck — Open-Source Agent Platform

    Ongoing

    A YAML-driven agent platform supporting OpenAI, Azure, and Ollama (via Semantic Kernel), with the Claude Agents SDK as a first-class backend — built with production-grade OpenTelemetry observability.

    github.com/justinbarias/holodeck →

  2. LLM Integration — Security Startup

    2023

    Sole contractor: designed the LLM use cases and built LangChain + Azure OpenAI assistants for a security-detection app, including a graph-to-LLM enrichment pipeline and feature-usage telemetry.

05 — Speaking $ cat talks.log // speaking · talks
  1. Jun 2026

    Stop vibing your agents to production

    AI Engineer Melbourne · Applying ML engineering discipline to agent development

    Talk resources → Recording → · Conffab subscription
  2. Apr 2017

    CI/CD on VM Scale Sets & Kubernetes Deployments

    ExpertsLive Australia — Melbourne

  3. Apr 2017

    CI/CD on VM Scale Sets & Kubernetes Deployments

    Azure Global Bootcamp

  4. Feb 2017

    Patterns & Anti-Patterns in CD Pipelines

    DevOps DeepDive — Sydney

06 — Skills $ ./skills --list // skills · metrics
  • AI & Agent Engineering Claude Agents SDK · MCP · LangChain · Semantic Kernel · PromptFlow · Azure OpenAI · RAG · Azure AI Search · pgvector · LLMOps · Azure AI Foundry · OpenTelemetry for AI
  • Distributed Systems & Cloud Domain-Driven Design · Cloud-Native Patterns · Kubernetes · AKS · Azure IaaS / PaaS / Functions
  • DevOps & Platform Engineering Terraform · ARM · Azure DevOps · GitOps (Flux) · CI/CD pipeline design
  • Full-Stack Engineering Python · TypeScript · Go · .NET 8 · ASP.NET Core · Blazor · React
  • Data Engineering & ML Python · Pandas · PySpark · PyTorch · Keras · Azure ML · Synapse Spark
  • Data & Persistence PostgreSQL · Azure CosmosDB · Azure SQL · MongoDB · Entity Framework
07 — Say hello $ ./contact // contact