Aram Barnett
AI Product Engineer — Staff / Founding · Agent Pipelines, Evals & Entity Systems
San Francisco, CA
Summary
Staff-level product engineer with 10+ years shipping AI-native products, fintech/crypto systems, and developer platforms from 0 to production — hands-on in code every day (TypeScript, Python). I build complete agent systems: LLM pipelines with eval harnesses, guardrails, memory, and retrieval, plus entity graphs with scoring across four production domains (wallets, tokens, markets, creators). Recent receipts: an autonomous pipeline turning raw scripts into validated budgets and schedules in production; a 17,000-entity market-intelligence graph over 22 automated connectors; a monetized multiplayer iMessage AI game built and shipped in 72 hours.
Core Skills
Experience
Curbily — CTO & Lead Product Engineer
Jul 2024 – PresentAI operating system for vertical-drama content production — script breakdowns to crew sourcing.
- Architected and personally built the multi-agent pipeline (Gemini) turning unstructured scripts into validated budgets, schedules, cast/shot lists, and scene breakdowns — evals check outputs against test sets for budget and shot-list accuracy, guardrails enforce union-rate floors so generated payments never fall below union minimums, retrieval spans web/local search and SAG rate data, and memory persists context between tool calls.
- Built the enrichment engine producing 2,900+ creator profiles from raw agency rosters — photos, stats, scoring, media kits — refreshed nightly at ~$40/run.
- Cut cloud cost ~80% while improving processing speed ~90%; instrumented AI spend, attributed 95% of it to one unwatched workload, and rebuilt pricing to a 97% gross margin.
- Designed an internal agent organization — 15 runbook-driven agent roles across engineering, QA, design review, content, and ops — letting a 3-person team ship like 20, with overnight runs and 6am status reports.
- Own end-to-end delivery daily: architecture, API design, prompt engineering, data modeling, UI/UX, Stripe usage-based billing, deployment, and code review.
WrldBuilder — Founder & CEO / Lead Product Engineer
2022 – 2024- Venture-backed Web3 product studio ($1M raised, managed to plan); built blockchain-integrated 3D applications (Unity, Solidity, Web3.js); scaled a global contractor marketplace to 160+ developers in under 30 days.
Nervos Network — Senior Product Manager, Special Projects
2021 – 2022- Designed and shipped a low-gas NFT standard adopted across the developer ecosystem; led 20+ engineers to ship a dynamic-NFT Web3 game; built cross-chain proxy APIs and developer tooling.
Powerboard — Co-Founder & Technical Lead
2020 – 2022- Play-to-earn gaming infrastructure; backend handled 100K+ requests/minute at 99.8% uptime; grew Discord-bot downloads +60% MoM to 40% retention; fielded multiple acquisition offers.
TRM Labs — Crypto Intelligence Lead
Dec 2019 – May 2020- Built data-collection tooling for AML/blockchain-attribution systems; gamified analyst workflows, cutting cost ~15% and raising collection rate ~50%; ran a global team of 15 with KPI dashboards (MySQL, GCP, Airflow).
Human Ventures — Entrepreneur in Residence
2018 – 2019- Built 0→1 ventures at a NYC startup studio (mobile collectible game + 4D-hologram companion hardware); designed a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric network across 70+ universities; led technical diligence for the studio's blockchain investment arm.
CoinScore — Founder / Head of Product
2016 – 2018- Token-scoring models across 1,100+ crypto assets (hundreds of data points per asset); grew 0 → 10,000 MAU; led acquisition and partnership conversations with major financial companies.
Selected Projects — shipped end to end, solo
- Slop Fight & Sprouts — iMessage-native AI games (2026): Built, shipped, and monetized a multiplayer battle game in 72 hours — LLM judge scoring, generative image renders on players' real selfies, video finishers, and $2.99 Apple Pay purchases in-chat; strangers paying within 48 hours of launch (Cloud Run, slopfight.lol). Forked the chassis into a second game in one evening; Sprouts development is grant-funded by the Aptos Foundation.
- MarketMotion — prediction-market intelligence (2025): 17,000+ entity knowledge graph over 22 automated connectors; AI entity discovery/NER and hop-proximity linking (DeepSeek-V3) with confidence scoring; cross-venue arbitrage across Polymarket (CLOB) and Kalshi; real-time alert engine and B2B API (Redis caching, leader election, batch processing).
- Barnett Labs (2026 – ): Fixed-price AI engagements delivered as working software — AI cost/margin audits, entity engines, agentic-inbox installs. labs.arambarnett.com
Leadership, Affiliations & Education
Launched one of the first US Bitcoin investment funds (2012) · Advisor to the SEC on token-sale regulation · Founding Member, Chamber of Digital Commerce Token Alliance · Guest Lecturer, Morgan State University · Advisor, Blockchain @ University of Michigan
Morehouse College — Studies in Economics & Physics (GPA 3.6)