Chris Youngblut
Forward-Deployed Engineer · Remote (US)
Forward-deployed engineer who reads a system by how it works and builds the part it’s missing — across industrial automation, trust & safety at platform scale, and managed AI-services.
Selected work
- Legal-AI system for a small practice — built the system the practice needed: an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server exposing case-work tools to Claude, over a Neo4j knowledge graph (Cypher) + Qdrant vector store with privilege-aware BGE-M3 hybrid retrieval (dense + sparse + late-interaction); document-access enforced as a code-level gate. In production; supported a matter that reached the Iowa Supreme Court.
- Claude Code dev-platform toolkit — a project-lifecycle promotion ladder (scope → private → public), guardrail hooks, session-continuity, and decision-encoding templates; stands up and governs every project in this list.
inkSpec— single-file, no-build HTML rendering engine: compiles LLM-authorable markdown/YAML/JSON specs into self-contained offline forms and dashboards; any design system plugs in as one CSS file of tokens against an enforced 51-token contract (386 tests). Public: github.com/chris-youngblut-solutions/spec-renderer.agent-harness— an MCP agent-supervision daemon exposing local-LLM / agent runtime as native tools and supervising the serving stack.opendbc-ag— MIT-licensed agricultural CAN/ISOBUS protocol library (2,690 frames, 76 tests, CI scope-policy gates). Public: github.com/chris-youngblut-solutions/opendbc-ag.voicekb— hold-to-talk Wayland dictation: on-device faster-whisper (int8) capture → tiered injection, hardened systemd user units, GNOME toggle; a 0-to-1 build, shipped public. github.com/chris-youngblut-solutions/VoiceKB.
Experience
Independent AI / Forward-Deployed Engineer — ^Loop Solutions · Nov 2025 – Present
Embedded client builds, and the infrastructure under them.
- Embed with a small practice and ship a production legal-AI system; author my own dev platform (the toolkit + an MCP agent-supervision daemon) — on owned hardware (multi-GPU servers, a Proxmox cluster, a Tailscale-meshed fleet).
- Provision the infrastructure too: Dell VRTX → Proxmox bootstrap (RACADM/Redfish), Ansible fleet automation with check-mode-first safety discipline, full observability (Prometheus / Grafana / Loki).
Trust & Safety — TikTok USDS · Apr 2022 – Sep 2025
Two roles: Account Inquiry Specialist → Risk Analyst. Queues, risk, and big-data systems.
- Built a root-cause-analysis program on production model misfires — systematic measurement, root-cause tracing, and correction of enforcement decisions on a live ML system at scale.
- Detected an account-takeover campaign via data-driven pattern detection and led the cross-team response; scaled abuse review from <50 to 800+ items/week with a detection pipeline, with no observed enforcement leakage.
Regional Product Manager — State Farm · Contract · Jan – Apr 2022
- Enterprise IT for State Farm branches — hardware/software lifecycle replacement and technical upgrade integrations across the regional network; hands-on support for branch end users (insurance agents and their staff).
Agricultural Technology Technician — Youngblut Farmland & Windy Acres Organic Farm · Apr 2019 – Mar 2021
- Precision agriculture — GPS guidance, weather-data modeling, IoT soil/crop sensors; maintained farm machinery and monitoring systems.
PLC / Production Technician — Pioneer · Feb 2017 – Jan 2019
Industrial controls and condition-based maintenance.
- Maintained and troubleshot pneumatic and hydraulic automation systems on production lines.
- Built and logged a preventive-maintenance program — baseline-and-deviation monitoring to catch failures before they happened.
Earlier
- Operations Manager — The ROC Gym (2010–15) · Sales Associate — Von Maur (2015–16) · Office Manager — a law firm (2016–17).
Skills
Build / agents: Claude Code skills + Agent SDK · MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers · project-lifecycle tooling · Python · Rust (D-Bus, cgroups, systemd) · FastAPI
AI / infra: LLM serving (vLLM, multi-GPU routing) · RAG / retrieval-augmented generation (BGE-M3 hybrid: dense + sparse + late-interaction over Qdrant + Neo4j) · GPU performance engineering (ROCm/Vulkan) · Proxmox / Dell iDRAC (RACADM/Redfish) · Ansible / IaC (infrastructure-as-code) · Tailscale · observability
Domain: Trust & Safety + abuse/risk at scale · industrial automation (pneumatic/hydraulic) · CAN/ISOBUS · CI/CD + signed releases · technical writing / SOPs