I came to engineering through customers, and that still shapes how I build.

My first decade was in sales and marketing, after earning a marketing degree from the University of South Florida. I worked in account and customer-facing roles where the job was to understand what a business actually needed, then help make it work in the real world.

At PrecisionLender, that background became the foundation for my technical work. I became the founding implementation engineer for the company's integration products, focused on turning early, bespoke delivery into a scalable implementation process for enterprise customers using systems like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365. There was no formal team or playbook at the start, so I helped define the discovery process, implementation patterns, customer handoff points, and delivery standards needed to support integrations inside regulated banking environments.

Over time, I built that work into a team. I hired new implementation engineers, set standards, and grew the group responsible for enterprise CRM and integration delivery across the customer base. That pattern has stayed with me: build the thing, then build the structure that lets others keep improving it.

I later moved fully into software engineering, working on Andi, PrecisionLender's virtual assistant, and shipping its first premium capabilities. As a senior engineer, I came back to the integrations team and led the development of an enterprise Dynamics 365 integration end to end, then helped carry an identity and access platform through a .NET 6 to .NET 8 upgrade.

In March 2025, I moved into engineering management. Today my role has two distinct parts. I lead a team of software engineers responsible for PrecisionLender's integration products, including the systems and APIs that enterprise commercial banking clients depend on. That work includes technical direction, delivery planning, product support, and making sure the team can ship reliably inside a complex enterprise platform.

At the same time, I'm acting as the engineering lead for a separate AI squad introducing the first AI-assisted features into the PrecisionLender platform. The squad brings together engineers from multiple teams across U.S. and offshore groups, so the work is as much about alignment and execution as it is about the technology itself. My job is to help turn early AI product direction into something the platform can actually support in production.

I also build with AI tools every day. I use Claude Code and Codex as part of my normal workflow, including a multi-agent pre-push system that reviews architecture, security, test coverage, and spec drift before code ships. Working this way has changed how I think about engineering leverage, especially the way AI can compound both speed and complexity.

In my spare time, I'm building Future Maker Studio, a platform that helps kids learn AI through a safe game-building interface. It lets them create and customize their own games while keeping the experience bounded, age-appropriate, and genuinely useful. That work keeps me close to the practical side of AI: safety, evals, product constraints, infrastructure decisions, and the gap between a demo and something real people can use.

The through-line is simple: I spent years close to customers, then moved deeper into the systems that serve them. I like ambiguous problems, practical architecture, and building AI products that hold up in front of real users.

Tony Passavanti
Charlotte, NC