Brian Shimkus

Product Engineering · AI Applications · Enterprise Integrations

Product engineer with 13 years of experience delivering customer-facing software, enterprise integrations, and regulated workflows. Led broker and trader onboarding modernization at Marex, integrated DocuSign across products, and managed a five-person front-end team. Experienced in stakeholder discovery, demonstrations, and cross-functional delivery. Currently developing applied AI applications focused on retrieval, source-grounded answers, and evaluation.

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13

Years Experience

5

Engineers Led at Marex

8h → 10m

Weekly Workflow Automated

AI Applications & Retrieval

  • •Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
  • •Embeddings, vector search
  • •Source-grounded answers
  • •LLM evaluation

Python & Backend

  • •Python
  • •FastAPI
  • •PostgreSQL, pgvector

Integrations & Automation

  • •REST APIs, webhooks
  • •Salesforce, DocuSign API
  • •OAuth 2.0/JWT
  • •Workflow automation

Cloud Deployment

  • •Python/FastAPI
  • •PostgreSQL/pgvector
  • •TypeScript/React applications

Customer Discovery & Delivery

  • •Requirements discovery
  • •Workflow mapping
  • •Solution design
  • •Technical demonstrations
  • •Stakeholder alignment
  • •Technical handoffs

Front-End Development

  • •TypeScript, React
  • •Accessible interfaces

Professional Experience

Independent Applied AI & Integration Engineer

Dec 2025 – Present

Insolla / Consulting and portfolio practice

  • •Scoped and delivered an automated content pipeline directly with a business owner, reducing a weekly social-media workflow from 8 hours to 10 minutes.
  • •Build AI and integration solutions connecting third-party platforms through REST APIs, webhooks, and automation tooling.
  • •Translate discovery into solution walkthroughs, security briefs, proof-of-value plans, and technical handoffs, documenting customer decisions, data risks, and implementation tradeoffs.
  • •Design Salesforce integrations with scoped access, OAuth 2.0 JWT authentication, source grounding, and human review.

Lead Front-End Developer

Aug 2025 – Dec 2025

TerraFort / Freelance

  • •Led design and development of an early-stage web and mobile platform from concept through delivery.
  • •Owned vendor evaluations and scoped third-party and AI integrations with UX, product, and backend teams.

Senior Front-End Developer

Jul 2024 – Jun 2025

OCC / Contract

  • •Ran weekly stakeholder sessions at a systemically important financial market utility, aligning goals, demonstrating progress, and resolving questions across workstreams.
  • •Delivered React and TypeScript solutions from Figma through testing, QA, and production.
  • •Implemented Mock Service Worker to unblock front-end development from backend dependencies.

Lead Front-End Developer

Oct 2020 – Jan 2024

Marex

  • •Led digitization of broker and trader onboarding, replacing a compliance-heavy paper workflow with an end-to-end digital process.
  • •Partnered with compliance, operations, and trading teams to scope rollouts and support adoption.
  • •Integrated the DocuSign API across products to support digital document signing.
  • •Led a five-person front-end team and designed and ran the team’s internship program.

Featured Applied AI Projects

Python / FastAPI / PostgreSQL + pgvector / Next.js

In progress

Ask TanStack Query: Documentation Assistant

Summary: Developing an unofficial TanStack Query documentation assistant focused on retrieving relevant source material, producing cited answers, and evaluating answer quality.

Build plan: Hybrid retrieval, reranking, streaming citations, handling of unsupported questions, and cloud deployment.

Evaluation plan: Check retrieval relevance and answer groundedness using real GitHub questions.

Intended impact: Reduce documentation lookup time while making technical answers easier to verify.

TypeScript / React / Express / LangGraph / PostgreSQL + pgvector

Planned

Resolution Desk: Multi-Agent Support Workspace

Summary: Planned support investigation workspace: policy and case specialists gather evidence in parallel, a coordinator proposes a cited response, and a human reviews the draft.

Architecture plan: Tool-scoped agents, embedding-based policy retrieval, persisted conversation and graph state, human approval before saving an internal action, and cloud deployment.

Evaluation plan: Compare single-agent and parallel workflows on evidence quality, latency, and token use; test approval, replay, and prompt-injection defenses.

Intended impact: Shorten support investigations while keeping response decisions under human control.

Earlier Experience

  • Senior Front-End Developer / Walker & Dunlop / ContractMar 2020 – Oct 2020

    Built Vue.js and Storybook components connected to APIs.

  • Senior Front-End Developer / ICFJan 2019 – Mar 2020

    Led the front-end lifecycle and standardized web accessibility across projects.

  • Front-End Developer / TransUnionJan 2018 – Jan 2019

    Built a Contentful CMS for marketing owners and deployed it to AWS.

  • UX Architect and Front-End Developer / R1 RCMApr 2016 – Jan 2018

    Identified gaps with directors and prototyped AngularJS solutions.

  • Front-End Developer / TimeZoneOne / ContractAug 2015 – Apr 2016

    Built WordPress themes for Athletico and the Chicago Wolves.

  • Junior Front-End Developer / KohactiveAug 2013 – Aug 2015

    Built Rails/SASS sites and led client meetings with Aon and Manchester United.

Formal Training

  • Bachelor of Fine Arts, Graphic Design / Illinois Institute of Art - Chicago2013
  • Instructional Design and Technology / Western Illinois University2008 – 2010

Based in Chicago, IL

brian@brianshimkus.com • linkedin.com/in/brianshimkus1 • github.com/brianshimkus