LucasCioffi
Agentic operations · for mid-sized companies · Accepting clients

I help operations leaders automate the work behind the work.

For nearly two decades I've shipped production software for companies that depend on it — Netflix, Mudflap, the New York Public Library. Today I build AI agents and dashboards that can quietly run a mid-sized company's most repetitive operations.

Lucas Cioffi, Principal

Where I've shipped
production software
CaptainUS Army Before software,
I served
West Point
B.S. Systems Engineering
US Army Ranger
Ranger School · Airborne
Infantry Captain
Mechanized Platoon · 1st Cavalry Division
Iraq Veteran
Combat Infantryman Badge
§ 01 — About

A senior engineer, equipped for an emerging gap.

Lucas Cioffi

I started this practice because I saw a gap that nobody was filling well. Mid-sized companies have real, expensive operational problems — shipping documents that don't match orders, invoices that need three-way reconciliation, internal analytics that wait days for the data team — and AI agents can now solve them. But the expertise to design and ship those systems reliably is still rare.

Big consulting firms move too slow. AI startups don't understand operations. I sit in the middle: a senior production-software engineer who has spent the last two years equipping myself with the latest agent tooling, and who has been shipping Ruby on Rails systems for nearly two decades.

Before this, I was a senior backend engineer at Mudflap, where my code supported millions of dollars in daily fintech transactions. I led teams for Netflix (via DockYard) and the New York Public Library. I co-founded Qiqo, where I built an event platform that grew to 200,000 users and a generative-AI concierge with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and vector search.

Starting my career, I was an Infantry Captain in the US Army, graduating from West Point and Ranger School. I served as the executive officer for a 125-person headquarters company, and led soldiers on their first combat mission, a three-day, 500-kilometer convoy from Kuwait to Baghdad. I was assigned as base security officer for a forward operating base of 1,200 American soldiers and 100 civilians which experienced elevated rifle, RPG, and mortar attacks.

That experience is why I build software the way I do — for systems that have to actually work, under real-world stress, with consequences if they don't.

Education
West Point, B.S.
Systems Engineering
Service
US Army Ranger
Combat Veteran
Tech Stack
Rails · Python
Claude · RAG
Based In
Hartsdale, NY
NYC Metro
§ 02 — The Problem

Your operations team is doing by hand what software should do.

i.

Too bespoke for SaaS

Off-the-shelf tools don't match how your business actually runs. So work falls back on spreadsheets, email threads, and senior people clicking through screens.

ii.

Too unglamorous for IT

Three-way matches. Shipping doc audits. Vendor invoice checks. No one wants to own it. So it stays manual, error-prone, and quietly expensive.

iii.

Exactly where agents excel

LLM-driven agents are now reliable enough to read documents, cross-reference systems, and flag exceptions — when someone designs the workflow correctly and builds it to last.

§ 03 — What I Build

Production systems, not proofs of concept.

01 / 04
Document reconciliation agents
Multi-source matching: shipping documents against orders, invoices against POs, claims against policies. Agents read, compare, and route exceptions to humans through a clean review dashboard.
02 / 04
Internal analytics interfaces
Natural-language interfaces over your existing databases. Non-technical staff ask questions in plain English — no SQL, no waiting on the data team for every report.
03 / 04
Multi-agent workflows
Orchestrated agents that handle entire processes end-to-end: extract, validate, enrich, escalate. Designed for reliability, auditability, and the realities of mid-sized company IT.
04 / 04
Advisory & design
For teams with engineers but no agentic experience: workflow architecture, tool selection, and design reviews so your team builds something that ships and survives contact with production.
§ 04 — The Approach

A four-week path from idea to running code.

Week 01 — Discovery

Find the real bottleneck

I sit with your operations team and trace the actual workflow. Not the org-chart version — the real one, with all the workarounds. We identify the highest-leverage process to automate first.

Week 02 — Design

Architect the system

I map the agent design, data flow, exception cases, and integration points. You get a clear architecture document and an honest assessment of what will and won't work.

Week 03 — Build

Ship a working prototype

A real, running system — Ruby on Rails dashboard, Python agents — handling your actual documents, your actual edge cases. Not a slideware demo.

Week 04 — Handoff

Deploy and document

Production deployment, runbooks, monitoring, and a knowledge transfer to your team. You own the code, the data, and the system from day one.

§ 05 — Selected Work

Drawn from my career. Built and shipped, not theorized.

Logistics / Operations

Agentic workflow for shipping document reconciliation

Designed the architecture for a multi-agent system at a $200M company to automatically verify shipping documents against orders — catching mismatches before they became chargebacks, claims, or customer escalations.

Role — Architect & Advisor
Generative AI / Marketplace

RAG-powered AI concierge at Qiqo

Built a generative AI concierge with retrieval-augmented generation, vector search, and a Rails-based interface, deployed on top of an event platform with 200,000 users. Production-grade RAG on real infrastructure.

Role — Co-Founder & Lead Engineer
Fintech / Backend at Scale

Backend systems for millions of daily transactions

Senior backend engineer at Mudflap, building third-party fintech integrations and metrics infrastructure on Rails, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Sidekiq for a system supporting millions of dollars in daily transactions.

Role — Senior Software Engineer
Analytics / Internal Tools

Natural-language analytics dashboard

An interactive dashboard letting non-technical administrators query a PostgreSQL database in plain English, surfacing trends that previously required a data analyst and a multi-day turnaround.

Role — Lead Engineer
Multi-Agent Orchestration

Agentic code factory

Orchestrated specialized agents that transform 10,000-line product requirement documents into full-stack web applications — proving the patterns for reliable multi-agent coordination at scale.

Role — Architect & Builder
Enterprise Engineering

Lead engineer for Netflix & NYPL

Led engineering teams at DockYard (Netflix contract) to build creative partner tooling, and at the New York Public Library to replace the main website search engine. Rails, Ember, React, AWS microservices.

Role — Lead Software Engineer
§ 06 — Behind The Work

I don't work alone.

Design & delivery, handled.

Every engagement is supported by a small team of specialists I trust. They handle design, project management, and delivery rigor — so the systems we ship don't just work, they're actually adopted by the operations teams that need them.

Sandra Nam
Sandra Nam
Design & Project Delivery

Sandra leads design and project delivery — translating messy operational reality into interfaces that real teams adopt on day one. She partners with me on every client engagement to ensure scope is clear, work ships on schedule, and the dashboards we build are ones operations teams actually want to use.

§ 07 — The Stack

Boring tech, built well.

The technology choices that survive your IT review, your security review, and five years of operations.

Ruby on Rails Web
Python Agents
PostgreSQL Data
Claude & GPT Models
Sidekiq & Redis Queue
React & Hotwire Native Frontend
AWS & Azure Deploy
REST & APIs Integration

Tell me about your bottleneck.

I take on a small number of engagements at any one time. If you have a repetitive operational process that's costing real money and real attention, send me a note describing it. A first conversation is always free and always direct.