Henry Irvin

Experience

I build and ship production AI systems, end to end, on a team or on my own.

This is the long version: what I have built, how, and what it did.

What I am doing now.

Goalvana, Co-founder and Principal Engineer

2025 to present

I started building Goalvana the last week of June 2025. The first production version was live about six weeks later. I had beta testers on it inside four months. In under a year, alone, I have taken it to eight deployable services, 336 API endpoints, 168 data models, 274 migrations, and over a thousand commits.

It is a coaching operating system: one platform to build, deliver, and grow a coaching practice, replacing the five-plus disconnected tools coaches stitch together for calendars, payments, programs, and messaging.

The engineering I am proudest of:

  • A program builder that turns a plain-language brief into a full structured curriculum, run by an orchestrator and parallel workers with a deterministic executor.
  • A support agent built on a real tool-use loop, no framework, with 16 tools that read and write live data, capped and guarded so it cannot run away.
  • A multi-provider LLM stack (Anthropic, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Deepgram) with prompt caching, response caching, and per-user token and quota tracking.
  • A database-driven prompt system with four-level override, so non-engineers can tune AI behavior without touching code.
  • The full product around all of it: React and Next.js front ends, Fastify and TypeScript services, Prisma and PostgreSQL, Stripe Connect for payments, Google Calendar OAuth, RRULE scheduling, Daily.co video, and Sentry, on Railway and Vercel. I held the quality line solo with 32 backend test suites and 88 end-to-end specs.

Interview Ready, built on the Goalvana engine

Real-time voice interview practice. You talk out loud with an AI interviewer that talks back, holds a real conversation, and scores every answer on structure, specificity, and impact against a 0 to 100 readiness model. It mines your best STAR and CARL stories through guided conversation, then feeds you weakness-weighted drills across multiple professional tracks.

The hard part is the voice loop: a real-time, full-duplex pipeline on Pipecat and Daily.co WebRTC, with Deepgram transcription, Silero voice activity detection, GPT-4.1 driving the conversation, ElevenLabs on speech, and GPT-4o handling the scoring. It runs on the same program engine I built for Goalvana.

Assessment Sync, Co-owner and Principal Engineer

2026 to present

Real-time scoring, ticketing, and fundraising for judged competitions, built solo in about four months across 200-plus API routes. I scoped one customer domain's exact workflow and shipped a configurable platform around it, which widened the market well past the first use case.

  • Multiple judges score live over Server-Sent Events, synced across audio, video, and scores on a single clock, with scoring scales that adapt to any judged event.
  • An AI pipeline transcribes judge audio with Deepgram and writes performance and event summaries with Claude, exported to PDF.
  • Stripe Connect handles payments end to end: Express accounts, a 3% application fee, QR ticketing with tiered pricing, and goal-tracked fundraising.
  • Cross-product single sign-on verifies Goalvana-signed tokens, so users move between both platforms on one login.

Fractional CTO and M&A technical advisor

2025 to present

I take on a small number of advisory and due-diligence engagements. I embed with companies to scope technical strategy, architecture, and delivery against real constraints, then own the result. I also run technical due diligence on both the buy side and the sell side, assessing architecture, risk, and team for investors and acquirers. I have been on both sides of an acquisition, so I know what the other side is looking for.

Career.

eLuma, Director of Technology

2022 to 2025

Previously Director of Software Engineering. K-12 teletherapy SaaS, in a FERPA, HIPAA, and COPPA regulated environment.

I worked directly with clinical and customer stakeholders to turn regulated, ambiguous requirements into shipped software. I led the rebuild and migration of a legacy platform onto a modern Laravel, Vue, and AWS architecture, which roughly 5x'd delivery velocity and stabilized release cadence. I shipped the customer-facing integrations that mattered, Google SSO and MFA, Salesforce, student information systems, and a Medicaid connector, and stood up the security and compliance foundations underneath them. I took technology fully in-house from contractors and rebuilt how the team delivered.

Vector Solutions, Senior Director of Software Development and Technical Owner

2017 to 2022

I led the consolidation of six acquired learning platforms into one unified SaaS architecture serving over 1.5 million users. I introduced CI/CD, architecture review, and delivery governance across multiple squads, and I partnered with corporate development on the technical due diligence behind acquisitions, buy side and sell side.

SimplyDigi, Director of Software Development and Co-owner

2008 to 2017

I joined as an early technical leader with significant equity and was core to the platform's growth from the ground up. We scaled an enterprise learning platform past 600,000 users, and the company was acquired by Vector Solutions in 2017. Along the way I re-architected the platform, cutting customization effort by roughly 60% and data-center costs by roughly 40%. This is the one exit on my record, and taking a bootstrapped platform all the way to an acquisition taught me more than any role since.

HealthStream, Senior Software Developer

2000 to 2008

I was part of the team that rewrote the core platform. When I joined, the stock was trading under a dollar. Today HealthStream is a public healthcare SaaS company doing over $300 million a year. I saw firsthand what a clean platform rewrite does for a company's trajectory.

Before that

I started in the U.S. Air Force, including a deployment to the Middle East. When I got out I went after a degree in physical therapy, but the insurance side of healthcare pushed me toward technology instead. I came up the hard way: network admin, then developer, then senior developer. Nearly every role since has been in EdTech, eLearning, or coaching platforms in regulated industries. The focus was deliberate.

How I build.

I work across the whole stack and the whole AI stack: agents and tool-use loops, RAG, voice pipelines, and evals, plus the frontend, data layer, payments, and deploy around them. Most of my code is AI-generated now, and I am fluent in driving Claude Code to ship evaluated, production-grade systems fast without shipping garbage. Twenty-plus years in regulated EdTech and healthcare means I build for FERPA, HIPAA, and COPPA, and for real users, not demos. I have run engineering teams through real change, and I still write the code.

Stack.

Languages

TypeScript, JavaScript, Node, Python, C#, SQL

Frontend

React, Next.js, Vite, Tailwind

Backend

Fastify, Prisma, PostgreSQL, REST, Server-Sent Events, JWT auth, Stripe and Stripe Connect

AI and LLM

agent and tool-use loops, OpenAI Realtime voice, RAG, prompt systems, evals, guardrails; Anthropic, OpenAI, Deepgram, ElevenLabs

Infra and practices

AWS, Railway, Vercel, Docker, Sentry, Playwright end-to-end testing, multi-tenant SaaS, CI/CD, AI-augmented development

Earlier in my career

C#, .NET, ASP.NET, SQL Server, SSIS, SSRS, Angular, SCORM, xAPI

Education and service.

  • B.S., Tennessee State University, 1999.
  • U.S. Air Force veteran, Middle East deployment.
  • Fully remote since 2008, based in Tallahassee, FL.