Tim Cardwell

Director of Software Engineering · Chicago

Tim Cardwell

I help enterprises scale product and engineering with AI.

Fourteen years building enterprise platforms and the teams behind them: growing an engineering department from zero to six teams, moving monoliths to event-driven systems, and now shipping AI across both product and delivery.

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Tim Cardwell standing along the Chicago lakefront

AI across product and engineering

AI changes both what enterprises can build and how quickly they can build it. I lead on both fronts.

AI in product

From chat to complex document intelligence

I've led delivery of dozens of AI-powered features, from conversational chat applications to complex document processing and structured data extraction, all running on enterprise platforms designed to carry them.

  • Chat applications
  • Document processing
  • Data extraction
  • RAG and vector search

AI in engineering

An SDLC built around AI agents

I introduced a new software development lifecycle that organizes engineers into pods and empowers each pod to manage AI agents. Those pods ship code significantly faster than traditional engineering teams.

  • Pod-based teams
  • Engineers managing agents
  • AI-augmented SDLC

Experience

  1. 2023 – Present

    Director of Software Engineering

    Keller Postman

    • Lead a department of six cross-functional teams, grown from zero, and report directly to executive leadership.
    • Architected and launched a greenfield, event-driven microservices platform that modernized the firm's core technology.
    • Replaced legacy vendor software with in-house solutions, saving over $2M a year and building an in-house engineering culture.

  2. 2020 – 2023

    Principal Software Engineer

    Seismic Software

    • Architected the "Seismic-protocol," a unified development framework that removed cross-team integration friction across global teams.
    • Led the migration from a monolith/microservice hybrid to a fully decoupled, event-driven architecture.
    • Engineered a document rendition system handling 100k+ uploads a day, with SRE practices and automated SLO/SLA monitoring.

  3. 2017 – 2020

    Engineering Lead

    Donnelley Financial Solutions

    • Built the engineering department from inception, establishing Agile workflows and a high-coverage automated testing culture.
    • Architected scalable microservices using CQRS and Clean Architecture, with OAuth2 security.
    • Mentored junior engineers into high-performing contributors.

  4. 2012 – 2017

    Software Consultant

    Echelon Consulting

    • Delivered full-cycle software projects for a range of enterprise clients.
    • Led the firm's Azure cloud migration and set standards for CI/CD, unit testing and scalable architecture.

B.S. Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Capabilities

Strategic leadership

  • Fractional CTO advisory
  • Department scaling (0 to 6 teams)
  • Multi-year roadmap planning
  • Stakeholder management

Technical architecture

  • Event-driven microservices
  • Distributed systems
  • CQRS and Clean Architecture
  • Legacy vendor displacement

Operational excellence

  • SRE maturity
  • Enterprise compliance
  • SDLC optimization
  • Cost optimization

AI, data and infrastructure

  • AI-augmented SDLC, Semantic Kernel, RAG, vector databases
  • .NET/C#, Node.js, Rust, Python, React
  • SQL Server, PostgreSQL, CosmosDB, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis
  • Azure, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, OAuth2/Auth0

Get in touch

Email is the best way to reach me.

timothy.cardwell@gmail.com