The Machine That Agrees With You
If emotional intelligence helps us use AI well, it also has to protect us from being seduced by it.
I build software whereresearch, product, and production meet.
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.
Platform architecture
Designing resilient platform systems, migration discipline, and delivery-ready engineering for complex teams.
Product engineering
Turning ambiguity into useful software through clear plans, incremental delivery, and operational realism.
Applied AI workflows
Using AI fluency as a capability layer to make engineering, review, and product work more productive.
Founder-led experiments
Building practical products and productized experiments that sharpen my judgment and engineering craft.
Latest Writing
View allPrompting Is Context Engineering, Not Magic
A good prompt does not trick an AI model into being smart. It builds the temporary world the model has to reason inside.
The AI Skill We're Undervaluing
Emotional intelligence may become one of the most important ways humans learn to work with machines.
We Need to Start Talking to AI Like It Thinks
We now have machines that do not merely execute instructions. They participate in reasoning. Not perfectly, not independently, not in some mystical human-equivalent sense - but enough that the mode of interaction has fundamentally changed.
Education and Career Snapshot
2024 - Present
Tilt Finance
- Staff Software Engineer
2020 - 2024
Octopus Deploy
- Senior Software Engineer
2017 - 2020
Zendesk
- Data Science Engineer (AI Team)
2014 - 2017
University of Melbourne
- PhD, Developmental Genetics
2010 - 2013
University of Connecticut
- MSc, Genetics, Genomics, and Bioinformatics
2007 - 2010
University of Connecticut
- BSc, Molecular and Cell Biology