Kurt Calderon

Full stack software engineer with 7+ years of industry experience shipping back-end services, full-stack applications, and AI-driven developer tooling at AWS, Amazon Alexa, and a contracting agency. Recent focus on production agentic workflows, prompt engineering systems, and RAG pipelines that translate LLM capabilities into measurable team-level efficiency gains. Comfortable owning ambiguous projects end-to-end and coordinating across engineering, UX, and non-technical stakeholders.

Experience

Software Development Engineer II, Back End Mar 2025 — Present

Amazon Web Services

Designed and shipped AI-driven workflows that automated infrastructure setup for new AWS regions and availability zones, reducing manual developer effort by ~85% and saving the team an estimated 1,400 engineering hours annually.
Own diagnostic software running on-site across all newly-built AWS data centers; deployed and validated systems during construction, then iterated on performance and reliability improvements post-deployment.
Partnered with hardware, networking, and operations teams to translate field issues into back-end fixes that scale across every new data center build.

Software Development Engineer II, Full Stack Aug 2021 — Mar 2025

Amazon

Designed and built front-end and back-end for an AI prompt-engineering feedback service that drove incremental quality improvements to the Alexa+ LLM-based response architecture, partnering closely with UX designers and non-technical leads.
Led a portfolio of projects spanning external partner APIs, internal CMS tooling, and micro-services integrated into the broader Alexa platform. Features in this space reach hundreds of millions of customers.
Served as SCRUM lead for the team: scoped and delegated sprint work, tracked delivery against quarterly commitments, coordinated with PMs and adjacent leads, and mentored junior engineers and interns.

Software Development Engineer Intern, Full Stack Jun 2019 — Sep 2020

Amazon

Shipped a voice-recognition personalization feature that addresses customers by name; reached 4M+ Alexa users by end of internship and 100M+ users to date.
Built a front-end content-management portal for internal teams authoring personalized Alexa content, including a division-wide analytics dashboard developed in collaboration with UX designers and metrics specialists.

Web Engineer, Full Stack Jan 2018 — Jan 2020

Meijun

Delivered dozens of client projects across WordPress sites, Node.js web apps, and React Native mobile apps, often owning the project from design hand-off through deployment.
Grew from front-end work into full-stack ownership by taking on the back-end systems powering client UIs, a transition built on three prior years as a freelance graphic designer.

Skills

AI / ML

Prompt engineeringAgentic workflowsTool integrationRAG pipelinesModel Context Protocol (MCP)OpenAI APIAnthropic APIAWS Bedrock

Languages

JavaKotlinJavaScriptTypeScriptPythonC++HTMLCSSBash

Frameworks & Platforms

ReactReact NativeNode.jsAWS SDK & ServicesUNIX / LinuxWordPress

Practices

SCRUM leadAgile / KanbanCI/CD pipelinesCode reviewTechnical mentorship

Projects

Quorra Jan 2026 — Present

Local-first AI assistant on a self-hosted home server (dual-GPU, 24GB VRAM), with all data and LLM inference kept on-device.

Stood up the full service stack: Authentik (SSO), Nextcloud (files/knowledge), Matrix (chat), llama.cpp (inference), and Qdrant (vector store); shipped working proofs-of-concept for LLM tool integration and the RAG ingestion pipeline.
Architected a tiered tool-permission model (read / write / destructive-with-confirmation) and a conversation-first integration pattern, treating native service UIs as visual aids rather than the primary interaction surface.