A field guide to a curious engineerSay hello ↗
The big picture of

Rick Kelly.

Systems thinker. Hands-on builder. People person.

I learn new domains, connect the big picture, and help teams ship. These days, that includes AI across the development lifecycle—and turning curiosity into working products.

FOLLOW THE THREAD · CURIOSITY → IMPACT
12YEARS OLD
THE FIRST SPARK

Started programming.
Never stopped building.

A lifelong habit of asking “what if?”—then figuring out how.

01
2006–2012

Lockheed Martin

LCS · Littoral Combat Ship
Junior Engineer↓Platform Architect

On a literal military combat vessel.

Grew into the platform architect role for the LCS, connecting software, embedded systems, hardware, and the people operating the ship.

02
2012–2014

ZeniMax Online

Senior Software Engineer
300,000+
concurrent players · no login outages at launch

Helped deliver a smooth login launch—and solved an integration challenge that other studios wanted to learn from.

03
2016–2021

LookingGlass

Principal Software Engineer
10M+
daily requests · an internet-wide data feed, processed daily

Architected and built nearly every part of the company’s data lake, alongside its cloud ecosystem and the pipeline used by data scientists and analysts.

AI / ML Cloud + isolated on-premises deployments
04
2021–2026

HubSpot

Lead Software Engineer / Senior 2
12KPORTALS
$380MPROCESSED

Rose to Team Lead and moved from team to team to help ship complex initiatives successfully—project after project.

05
AFTER HOURS. STILL BUILDING.
2014 → ONGOING

The creative thread

Game studio owner · independent developer
Top 100
launched on iOS + Android

At Under Byte Studios, LLC, I built and launched Heroes Guard—owning the journey from game design and code to art, publishing, and a top-100 release.

#34Top PaidGoogle Play
Top 100Paid StrategyiOS
Now building Heroes Guard: Starforge
The next coordinates

Meaningful work.
Good people.
Let’s build something.

THE ROLELead / Staff / Principal
Engineer
THE TEAMTrust & ownership
Low ego. Empowered people.
THE SETUPFully remote
U.S. · Maryland

Hands on with the code. Invested in the people. Thinking about the whole system.