I’m Clinton Judy

AI Product Engineer | Full–Stack Developer | RAG Architect | Production ML Builder | Rails Veteran | DevOps & SRE

Father, music producer, AI builder, hackerspace founder…

Get to Know Me

Builder of Things That Think.

Senior engineer at Retail Zipline, where I built Zippy—a production RAG chatbot that’s been the company’s flagship AI feature for over two and a half years. Before most engineers had heard of retrieval-augmented generation, I was shipping it to paying customers.

I’ve been a Rails developer for 15+ years, but these days my work lives at the intersection of traditional web engineering and AI/ML. I designed and built Zippy’s full stack: ingestion pipelines that decompose documents into atomic facts, vector search with pgvector, streaming LLM responses, and—most recently—tool calling via OpenAI’s Responses API. I’m also the author of open-source libraries like Kanina (RabbitMQ) and Artful.ly (event ticketing).

Born and raised in State College, Pennsylvania. Father of two. Music producer on weekends (WeeklyBeats). Still believe the best code is written by people who give a damn.

Download Resume

Open Source Projects

Kanina

Lifeviz

Karma

Artful.ly

Experience

Curriculum Vitae

2019–NOW

Senior Web Engineer – Retail Zipline

  • Built Zippy, the company’s production RAG chatbot and flagship AI feature—from zero to shipped in months, now live with 50+ retail brands for 2.5+ years. Designed the full architecture: document ingestion pipelines, atomic fact extraction via LLM, pgvector semantic search, streaming responses, and access-controlled retrieval.
  • Integrated OpenAI Responses API with function calling, enabling Zippy to autonomously decide when to search and call tools.
  • Shipped multi-turn conversations, query refinement, streaming responses, and user feedback systems.
  • Built individual learner reports for the Learning Insights suite—overdue tracking, filtering by security level, team, and user.
  • Built Report Builder—a flexible reporting tool with custom columns, filters, helper text, and role-based access.
  • Built Assessment tools—historic results, auditee search, scoring and sorting, and the complete auditor results workflow.
  • Shipped discussion comment threading, notifications, mention tracking, and pagination across the messaging system.
  • Built MegaSeed, an internal developer tool for generating large-scale fake data to test performance characteristics as the platform scales.
  • Built REST Hooks integration for Zapier, enabling customers to connect Zipline with external tools and workflows.
  • Built a complete video transcoding pipeline using AWS MediaConvert and HLS streaming for user-uploaded content.
  • Migrated a large number of legacy reports to BigQuery as part of a small team—painstaking work matching edge cases to ensure numbers were exact.
  • Contributed to PDF ingestion for the AI knowledge base, including upstream fixes to an open-source PDF parser to handle multi-column layouts correctly.
  • Prototyped the AI Quiz Generator during a company hackathon—automatically turns lessons into personalized quizzes. Later rebuilt by a dedicated team for production.
  • Built survey filters, set up automated performance testing on CI, and shipped caching optimizations across the stack.

2018–2019

Senior Web Engineer, Ops Team – Flatiron School

  • Led effort to consolidate logs, metrics and traces across services in large microservice architecture, increasing visibility and reducing MTTR.
  • Worked on migrating several services from Digital Ocean to AWS.
  • Assisted with book club, leading sessions on designing microservice architectures and object-oriented programming with Ruby.

2016-2018

Senior Site Reliability Engineer – AccuWeather, Inc.

  • Designed and developed a continuous integration/deployment system for the mobile and desktop websites (m.accuweather.com and www.accuweather.com)
  • Created a complete monitoring system for the public website, tracking 100s of statistics for 10s of millions of requests daily.
  • Created automated systems to deploy most public-facing AccuWeather presences, and ensure operational consistency within clusters.
  • Created several new open-source Ansible role libraries, and contributed code to Terraform.
  • Created an open-source query editor for the Microsoft Application Insights Grafana data source.

2016

Senior Web Developer – EFC Systems, Inc.

  • Designed and developed a dashboard with Javascript and D3 to quickly convey pertinent information concerning precision agriculture.
  • Fixed a multitude of bugs within a 10+ year old codebase, building a full–stack testing system to automatically watch several ancient error–prone areas.
  • Overhauled user authentication, bringing it up to speed with modern encryption standards.
  • Designed and developed several front-end tools, including a parallel-computed variable rate irrigration pivot zone tool (VRI), and a fertilizer blend tool calculator using linear programming.

2013 – 2016

Senior Rails Engineer – Agrian, Inc.

  • Designed and implemented several major service-oriented applications for the precision agriculture industry.
  • Devised programming strategies for handling wide variety of raw file data formats.
  • Optimized code for handling big data problems (100 million rows per month).
  • Rewrote legacy code to distribute work and reduce load (100s of workers, 100,000s of jobs daily).

2012 – 2013

Open Source Lead – Fractured Atlas

  • Worked on Artful.ly, a complex system for customer relation management and selling tickets online.
  • Turned Artful.ly into an open source Rails engine for use by other organizations.
  • Developed discount system for promoters and customers when selling and buying tickets.
  • Developed advanced searching and list segment features for organizing customer lists.
  • Overhauled the sign up and sign-in flows for Artful.ly, increasing conversion rates.

2007 – 2019

Freelance Educator & Consultant

  • Founded The Make Space, a new hackerspace in State College.
  • Regular speaker at the State College Ruby Group, with a series of talks on subjects like “New Elements in HTML5 and CSS3,” “EventMachine,” “ActiveRecord,” “Node.JS,” “CoffeeScript,” and “How to use Pry”.
  • Tutored students in programming with Ruby and advanced HTML and CSS.
  • Consulted several local startups on application development, effective UX design, software estimation, and object-oriented design.
  • Started Jr. Robotics club, teaching 2-3rd graders mechanical motion, electronics, and basic programming.

2012

Contract Web Developer – Copious, Inc.

  • Worked on VIE Sports, a social networking site for athletes.
  • Created the achievement system, rewarding users for actions taken throughout the site.
  • Developed the “wall”, a feed of your comments, competitions entered, scores, friendships made, and even more.
  • Developed privacy controls, so you get to control which people get to see which things you’ve done.
  • Designed parts of the UI, including score entry and location search.

2009 – 2011

Web Developer – West Arete

  • Estimated, designed, developed, and launched websites out of several experimental technologies and ideas with MIT, Penn State, the DOT, and the Marine Biological Laboratory.
  • Project lead on websites for several high-profile companies in Centre County, PA.
  • Represented the company at networking events.
  • Assisted the hiring process for new employees.
  • Respected for my opinion with the direction of the company.

Testimonials

Helzberg Diamonds

Zippy returns an answer instantaneously…it’s on-brand, easy to engage with…and cites every source, so it makes it really easy for admins to update our library.

Ryan Holm
District Vice President, Retail Innovation & Operations

Tuft & Needle

Clinton is a valuable asset to our team. He is very thorough with detail and solves problems creatively. I’ve had the pleasure to work side by side with him on several projects and am always impressed by his insights and abilities to methodically chunk down large problems into smaller manageable pieces. I highly recommend Clinton as a great addition to any team.

John-Thomas Marino
Cofounder / CEO

Copio.us

Clinton is a exemplary asset to our team. His work is consistently delivered on time, to spec, and within budget, and his code meets our high standards of test coverage, documentation, and maintainability here at COPIOUS. Clinton is a leading example of a well-balanced web engineer: he’s equally adept at designing enjoyable user interfaces as he is at developing a strong database schema. I’m comfortable offering a wide variety of work to him, as he would make a great addition to any development team.

Danne Stayskal
Artificial Intelligence Engineer

EFC Systems

Clinton is one of the most intelligent and insightful developers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. He has a rare combination of skills that allow him to reason thoughtfully at every layer of the stack and every step of the process, from database architecture and UX design to testing and deployment, coupled with the patience to fully explore and master a given problem space. He’s an easy person to get along with and work alongside, and his passion for software development and willingness to tackle hard problems makes him a great addition to any team looking for a long-term force multiplier.

Alex Webb
Software Development Lead

West Arete

Clinton is a creative, enthusiastic web developer. At West Arete, he was always interested in learning and applying the latest technologies. He was able to quickly become comfortable with new languages and techniques and apply them to our problems. Given a specific task, Clint knew how to focus on it and work it to completion. On several of our projects, he showed an excellent ability to design classes and objects and separate responsibility between layers of code. Clint always had an even–keeled demeanor and was a pleasure to work with.

Scott Woods
President

Contact Me

Let’s build something that thinks.

Say
Hello

Clinton Judy

Want to talk AI, Rails, or building products that matter? Email me at [email protected].