Torrin Leonard

Full Stack Software Developer

Equator Studios

Mar 1st, 2023 to Present

• Built a 0 to 1 AI proposal product as its sole engineer through the initial build, then led it as the team grew to seven, authoring the majority of commits and 64% of the code.
• Rebuilt the marketing site on Next.js and own it end to end through CI/CD and release, growing organic search from under 1,000 clicks and under 1M impressions to 52.1K clicks and 6.17M impressions in six months.
• Authored and merged 70 production releases on the AI product, and served as release manager for a main-product release, coordinating the rollout through pre- and post-push testing.
• Built the RAG ingestion and retrieval pipeline on OpenAI embeddings and Qdrant, migrated off ChromaDB, using query-expansion retrieval rather than single-vector search.
• Implemented a client model fine-tuning pipeline on the OpenAI fine-tuning API, and a proxy metering token cost per user on every model call.
• Built an admin prompt orchestration layer so non-engineers tune production AI behaviour live, with versioned code-defined fallbacks and prompt-injection and hallucination guards.
• Integrated server-hosted GIS segmentation models (SamGeo, LangSAM) for satellite imagery selection in the main app.
• Added Stripe payment systems and supported site-based pricing rollout with product.
• Onboarded and mentored 2 full-time developers, reviewed 55 merge requests, and set written acceptance criteria on work handed off to them.
• Created and decomposed 2 company epics, sit on interview panels, and hold the architecture decision on the AI product and the frontend.
• Wrote and maintain the team developer handbook, commit and merge-request policy, and engineering principles with a self-review checklist.

Co-Founder & CEO, Lead Software Developer

This Cozy Studio

Oct 1st, 2021 to Mar 1st, 2023

• Founded and ran a federally incorporated 3D modeling and rendering contract pipeline studio across 7 client engagements with no outside funding; owned product, clients, contracts, and delivery end to end.
• Built per-client combinatorial rule engines and unattended batch rendering on rented GPU capacity, delivering over 50,000 rendered files to one client in under a week.
• Open-sourced the studio's Blender tooling (see Projects) and grew a companion tutorial channel to 282,388 views and 3.29K subscribers across 25 videos, driving adoption.

Automation & Accessibility Engineer (Contract / Part-time)

League

Mar 1st, 2021 to May 1st, 2022

• Built TestCafe regression suites in TypeScript/JavaScript, reducing manual cycles and improving release confidence.
• Performed WCAG accessibility audits and partnered with engineers/PMs to ship compliant releases; triaged defects within CI workflows.

Automation & Accessibility Engineer (Contract / Part-time)

worX4you

Jun 1st, 2013 to Mar 1st, 2021

• Delivered manual and automated testing as a contractor for clients including TunnelBear, Hubba, THRILLWORKS, and Hopscotch, building reusable test tooling and cross-browser checklists for WCAG-aligned releases.

• Lead developer of a 70-component library published to npm under MIT (619 of 1,105 commits); powers Equator's mapping/AI platform, torrin.me, and OpenGig.org.

• Agent-authored modules stored as Postgres rows, each run in a per-invocation child process under its own unix uid to block V8 inspector escapes between peers.
• Egress proxy with a local CA terminates TLS only for hosts with a managed secret, so module code never holds plaintext credentials; nftables enforces the boundary.

• Built solo across 581 commits: full-stack JavaScript with a custom UI framework, database state-sync, and a WebSocket layer, deployed on DigitalOcean behind NGINX with GitHub Actions CI.

• 1,015 stars and 324 forks; used by multiple studios. Authored 423 of 496 commits across 7 releases.

• 116 stars, one of five open-source Blender tools totalling 1,168. Shipped Sept 2022, two weeks after Stable Diffusion's public release and three months before ChatGPT, with the studio hosting the weights.

• Uses Whisper to auto-generate and align lyrics for time-synced playback.
• Displays time-synced lyrics in an Apple-style karaoke mode lyric scroller.
• Enhances albums with additional metadata like artwork and descriptions.

• Built solo across 338 commits: a live directory of 663 published startups scraped and enriched from Communitech, Velocity, and other regional hubs, with news, events, and jobs subsystems running on the same pipeline machinery.
• Chose browserless scraping (got, cheerio) after a measured bake-off across 493 sites recovered content for 98.8%, retiring the headless browser and Docker from the stack.
• Serves a public MCP server with a hand-rolled OAuth 2.1 authorization server (Dynamic Client Registration, PKCE) so claude.ai and ChatGPT connectors can attach while anonymous clients still work.