I'm Paul Gradie - a scientist-trained staff software engineer, platform leader, founder, and AI-fluent product builder. I help teams move from ambiguity to production systems that are testable, observable, maintainable, and useful.
Designing resilient platform systems, migration discipline, and delivery-ready engineering for complex teams.
Turning ambiguity into useful software through clear plans, incremental delivery, and operational realism.
Using AI fluency as a capability layer to make engineering, review, and product work more productive.
Building practical products and productized experiments that sharpen my judgment and engineering craft.
Since GPT-3 I have handed every new AI model the same hard problem: animate a black hole warping a grid of spacetime, with a star orbiting through it. Here is how that test went from a static matplotlib plot in 2023 to something Fable 5 basically solved — featuring the three interactive animations it produced.
Three years ago I wrote an essay arguing that the Big Bang scattered matter across the universe without anything ever moving faster than light — space itself inflated. Back then all I had were words. Here is the same argument as an interactive animation you can scrub through.
If emotional intelligence helps us use AI well, it also has to protect us from being seduced by it.
A good prompt does not trick an AI model into being smart. It builds the temporary world the model has to reason inside.
2024 - Present
Tilt Finance
2020 - 2024
Octopus Deploy
2017 - 2020
Zendesk
2014 - 2017
University of Melbourne
2010 - 2013
University of Connecticut
2007 - 2010
University of Connecticut