Engineering IC
Senior / Staff / Principal Software Engineer
End-to-end ownership: architecture, build, ship, observe. Full-stack across TS, PHP, Swift, Kotlin, Python. Remote-first, anywhere in the US.
Now booking 2026 engagements
Hire Kevin Champlin · Senior Software Engineer · AI Engineer · Chicago metro
20+ years shipping production systems. Currently open to the right team.
I'm completing a Fortune 500 engagement at Levi Strauss & Co. and have capacity opening for the right next thing. Senior / staff / principal IC, applied AI engineering, engineering management, or project work through Champlin Enterprises. W2, contract, or contract-to-hire. Remote anywhere in the US, or onsite in the Chicago metro.
Applied AI
AI / ML Engineer (applied)
Production LLM systems: agentic pipelines, RAG, evals, fine-tuning, cost / latency / safety guardrails. I have public artifacts to verify.
Leadership
Engineering Manager / Tech Lead
Small senior team owning a meaningful surface. Hands-on tech leadership, not pure people management. EM/TL with real leverage.
Project work
Contract or project engagement
T&M or fixed-fee project work through Champlin Enterprises, LLC. F100/500 retained; local businesses welcome.
20+
years shipping production code
F100 / F500
enterprise client experience
8+ hrs/day
inside Claude Code in production
3 books
published on practical AI
Live receipts (public, running in production)
The AI Tax
PHP · MySQL · LLM extraction · Chart.js
Living dataset of AI-driven layoffs. 105,014+ people impacted across 38 events. Daily cron, structured extraction, Dataset JSON-LD. Built end-to-end in an afternoon.
AI Showcase ↗
Laravel · Livewire · Reverb · Anthropic API
Educational, interactive walkthrough of production AI work. Live cost telemetry, kill switch, glossary spine. Every API call gated.
Diamond AI ↗
PHP · MLB API · Auto-learning pipeline
MLB prediction engine. Predictions auto-graded hourly; auto-tunes overnight from yesterday's accuracy. Public OpenAPI + SDKs.
Vantage AI ↗
Laravel · Claude API · 3-model ensemble
Self-tuning equity market analysis. Momentum + mean-reversion + sentiment with adaptive weights. Claude commentary on every call.
Claude skills (OSS) ↗
Bash · Markdown · Claude Code internals
Six MIT-licensed Claude Code skills I use every day. PRs welcome. Bridges the gap between cute demos and daily-driver workflows.
Three published books
Practical AI · Amazon KDP
The Operator's Edge, Ship It, and a third title on AI-driven small-business ops. I've shipped what I write about.
Stack proficiency
Languages
- TypeScript / JavaScript
- PHP (8.x, Laravel 11/13)
- Swift / SwiftUI
- Kotlin / Compose Multiplatform
- Python
- C# / .NET
AI / ML
- Anthropic API (Claude)
- OpenAI API (GPT-4/5)
- Google Gemini
- RAG, embeddings, vector search
- Agentic toolchains
- Evals + guardrails
Frameworks & runtime
- Next.js / React
- Laravel · Livewire · Reverb
- Node · Bun
- SwiftUI · @Observable
- Kotlin Multiplatform
- WordPress (custom + headless)
Data & infra
- MySQL · PostgreSQL · SQLite
- Redis · queues · cron
- AWS · Vercel · Plesk
- CI/CD · observability
- Mailgun · Resend · Twilio
- DNS / SPF / DKIM / DMARC
If your team is shipping interesting work, let's talk.
I work where the work is interesting and the team ships. Quiet, senior, end-to-end. No junior handoffs, no slide decks, no theater. Reach out, and I'll respond inside 24 hours.