Skip to content

product engineer

KevinMurphy

Holistic engineering as a discipline, guided by anthropology. I surface end-user insight against technical constraints in discovery, then ship software end to end: data model, API, cloud, and the interface users actually touch, AI-augmented throughout.

PoolRMFirm initiativeNestJS + AWS backend, AI-built, 300+ weekly users

Kevin Murphy, product engineer based in Tempe, Arizona

It's raining my tech stack.

approach

  1. Typed contracts, bounded queries, observable failures, performance budgets that hold under traffic. Five years at Deloitte have put this discipline against real stakes. React modernizing Michigan’s unemployment insurance for 270K residents across 2,000+ pages, ReactJS + TypeScript handling 880M IRS.gov visits and $4.7T in tax collection, Salesforce LWC cutting bank onboarding to FedNow from 60 days to 7. Before any taste shows up, the build has to not break.

  2. The user-facing layer is where a product earns or loses the user, on every interaction. A button that hesitates, a chart that flickers in, an error that says "something went wrong" instead of what to do next: those are the moments trust is decided, and they happen on the surface. Most teams treat the surface as a delivery layer; I treat it as the proof that the rest of the build works. My open-source artifacts on user-facing AI surfaces (tablesalt, streamfield) are where I show that work in public.

  3. Senior isn’t a title. It’s the standard you set for the team. At Deloitte I coached seven juniors and mid-level consultants; one teammate went from 40% to 95% utilization inside a year. The most durable thing I’ve shipped is the bar people kept running after I rotated off the engagement.

projects

All projects

selected writing

All writing

off the clock

a guitar player — A '57 reissue Strat. A PRS CE24. A Taylor acoustic when nobody wants to be loud., a concert chaser — Spafford. Goose. Phish. If you know, you know., a blues believer — Jimi Hendrix is my hero in life. Albert King, Muddy Waters, and yes — John Mayer's blues chops are the real deal., a rock disciple — Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. The rest fills in around them., a jazz nerd — I'm there for the improvisation, not the names. Anyone who can actually solo over the changes., a funk evangelist — Cory Wong. The Meters. James Brown. Vincen García on the modern side., a jam-band convert — Long shows where the band actually goes somewhere. Setlist forensics on the drive home., a gym regular — Strength + zone-2 cardio. Boring works., a home cook — Stainless only. No grill. Top-shelf meal preps. Working on the butter-basted ribeye., a cat dad — His name is Ralph. He runs the house. I lease space., an animation enthusiast — Ralph Breaks the Internet. The Lorax. Comfort rewatches., a student of buddhism — Pema Chödrön. Thich Nhat Hanh. Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now on a re-read every couple years., a meditation practitioner — Daily-ish. Some days I just stare at the wall., a pickleball convert — Yes I bought the paddle. Yes it was worth it., a restaurant scout — Hidden Phoenix lists, road-trip detours, never the highway exits., a new-tech enthusiast — Claude Code is the daily driver. EVs and climate tech eat the rest of my attention., a technologist — Day-job senior engineer. Off-hours it's indie SaaS and whatever model dropped this week., a road-trip romantic — I-70 through Colorado. Day trip to the Grand Canyon., a lifelong tinkerer — Take it apart, put it back together, learn what was actually broken., a video-game lifer — Pokémon Blue on a Gameboy Color got me started. Now the Steam library's deep enough to be embarrassing., an RPG diehard — Started on Runescape in middle school. Now it's Elden Ring and BG3 eating weekends.