Daniel Nakitare

about

From a fireteam to a build pipeline.

Before software, I was an 11B Infantryman in the 101st Airborne Division. Combat Infantry Badge · Purple Heart, Afghanistan, 2011–2014. The discipline that kept us alive — clear ownership, real consequences, no half-measures — is the same discipline I bring to the systems I ship now.

Seven years building production backend and full-stack systems across healthcare SaaS, legal tech, and enterprise platforms. I own EHR integrations across nine-plus platforms at Carefeed, architect data pipelines that hundreds of facilities depend on, and design APIs for the kind of environments where a failure case becomes a regulatory finding.

Lately, the AI-infrastructure work: runtime governance for agents (Imara, on npm), MCP gateways (Mavryn), capability-broker architecture for local agents in regulated industries (Castellan).

MBA from Temple. BA from Pomona. Spent a decade running a business in East Africa before tech — the kind of P&L responsibility that makes most engineering tradeoffs feel routine.

work history

Where the bills got paid.

Jun 2025 — present Carefeed

Senior Software Engineer

Own all EHR integrations across nine-plus platforms (Epic, PointClickCare, MatrixCare) — architected secure data-exchange protocols and webhook handlers for patient and facility data sync. Architected the enterprise PDF/OCR processing pipeline that automates invoice handling for hundreds of healthcare facilities, and modernized SFTP integration architecture across 20+ payroll systems.

Authored the team's foundational standards for LLM-assisted coding tools, with every rule verified against the actual codebase.

Resolved a four-year backlog of 27,000+ failed EHR uploads by fixing the underlying data-integrity bug and shipping cleanup tooling — recovered data integrity to 99%+ reliability.

Aug 2024 — Jun 2025 nQ Zebraworks

Senior Engineer

Returned to nQ at Senior level to own DataQ's API infrastructure end-to-end — a data integration platform for law firms handling sensitive conflict-of-interest data. Built high-performance RESTful APIs improving data-processing efficiency by 30%; implemented OAuth2 and role-based access control to meet legal-sector compliance requirements.

Jun 2023 — Apr 2024 Sensible Care

Full Stack Engineer

Full-stack engineer on a healthcare SaaS platform serving behavioral health providers (Laravel/Vue.js). Automated medical referral processing with Tesseract OCR, eliminating manual data entry across clinical workflows; integrated payment-processor and insurance-validation APIs; migrated the billing system from legacy codebase into a modern Laravel monolith.

Jul 2021 — May 2023 nQ Zebraworks

Software Engineer

Architected the backend of a business-intelligence dashboard on a cloud-based legal practice-management platform. Cut infrastructure costs by 50% through MySQL query optimization; slashed data-aggregation processing times by 75% with Redis caching and Laravel deferred job queues.

Oct 2020 — Jul 2021 Buckeye Interactive

Software Engineer

Built MVPs for multiple clients simultaneously at a small engineering agency. Led projects as primary developer; managed AWS EC2/Docker/Nginx infrastructure for all client work; shipped production applications for Columbus Metropolitan Library, OpportunityPort, and AFCPE.

Mar 2019 — Oct 2020 boomtime

Software Engineer

Built secure internal and external APIs with authentication and RBAC for a digital agency's proprietary platforms. Established comprehensive unit-test coverage, reducing bug reports by 90%; designed custom integrations automating data export to clients' third-party services.

2011 — 2014 U.S. Army · 101st Airborne

11B Infantryman

Combat Infantry Badge · Purple Heart · Afghanistan Deployment. Conducted combat operations under fire, making rapid high-consequence decisions in ambiguous environments. Trained 200+ personnel on tactical operations; managed $2M+ in military equipment under combat conditions.

building

Selected work.

Spec · 2026

Castellan

Specifications and decision records for a proof-of-concept on delegated authority in local AI agent systems, applied to industrial maintenance work-order triage. Capability-broker architecture, hash-chained audit substrate, refusal as a first-class outcome. Written from the auditor's perspective.

ArchitectureLocal LLMsIndustrialSpec-first

Building · Beta

Aether

AI agent runtime with hardware-level isolation via Firecracker microVMs. Multi-tenant REST API, distributed scheduler with Kafka and etcd, JWT/RBAC, PostgreSQL persistence, OpenTelemetry observability, Kubernetes/Terraform deployment. Forty-eight thousand lines of Go.

GoFirecrackerKubernetesKafka

Shipped · App Store

PhotoPare

Privacy-first iOS app for cleaning up photo libraries. Finds duplicates, blurry shots, and forgotten screenshots using Apple's Vision framework — one hundred percent on-device. No accounts, no uploads, no tracking SDKs. Free to scan, one-time $4.99 unlock for deletion.

SwiftSwiftUIVisionStoreKit 2

Prior Auth Assistant

Reference architecture for a HIPAA-shaped healthcare AI app. PostgreSQL row-level security, Fernet field-level PHI encryption, HMAC-chained audit log, prompt-injection hardening. Live demo.

Python · FastAPI · React

Imara

Runtime AI agent governance. MCP tool-call interception, YAML policy engine, SHA-256 hash-chained audit trails. EU AI Act, SOC 2, HIPAA compliance mapping. Published on npm.

TypeScript · MCP · OPA

Mavryn

MCP gateway that proxies multiple upstream MCP servers through one endpoint. Tool namespacing, intelligent search, allow/deny policies, health checks, audit logging. Published on npm.

TypeScript · MCP · Gateway

Kombe

AI-assisted iOS SSH terminal with WireGuard encrypted tunneling, Claude API command assistance, and a companion macOS daemon for tunnel management. Pre-App Store.

SwiftUI · WireGuard · macOS

Laravel Outbox

Transactional Outbox pattern for Laravel. Persists events and queued jobs atomically with business writes, then replays them through a concurrent-safe worker with backoff and dead-letter.

PHP · Laravel · Reliability

Thinking out loud, in public.

May 2026 · Specs & decision records

Castellan — delegated authority for local AI agents

Six specifications and thirteen architectural decision records for a proof-of-concept on delegated authority in local AI agent systems, applied to industrial maintenance work-order triage. Capability-broker architecture, hash-chained audit substrate, refusal as a first-class outcome. The thesis: an industrial buyer should not have to trust the AI — they should have to trust the authority broker and the audit substrate, which are small, inspectable, and behave like things they already know how to evaluate.

Read on GitHub

education

Where the credentials came from.

Temple University

MBA · Innovation Management & Strategy

2017 · Fox School of Business

Pomona College

BA · Politics & Economics

2010

contact

Let's talk.

Open to senior backend engineering roles, with staff-level scope at the right fit. Particular interest in healthcare SaaS, AI infrastructure, and compliance-regulated systems. Also happy to talk backend architecture, API design, or whatever you're building.

Open to senior & staff conversations

emaildnakitare@gmail.com githubDnakitare linkedinin/dnakitare