Curtis La Graff

Software Architect & Engineering Leader • Consultant

Launch-tested lead for customer-facing platforms; observability-first and calm in incidents.

Pinckney, MI

www.lagraff.me

Summary

Software Architect & Engineering Leader with 10+ years building customer-facing platforms, leading teams through high-visibility launches, and owning reliability/on-call. Blends hands-on design (cloud, microservices, frontends) with calm, client-facing incident leadership across automotive, fintech, and retail.

Skills

Architecture & Platforms
Microservices
Event-driven
API strategy
Domain modeling
Reliability patterns
SLOs/observability
Azure (Functions, Data Factory, App Service, AKS)
AWS (ECS/Lambda)
Docker
CI/CD (GitHub Actions/Jenkins)
C#/.NET
Java/Kotlin (Spring)
Go
Python
TypeScript/JavaScript
Angular/React
Blazor
SQL
MongoDB
Kafka/Kinesis
REST/GraphQL
Production readiness
On-call/incident leadership
Stakeholder communication
Mentoring/hiring
Agile/Lean

Education

Lawrence Technological University

B.S. Computer Engineering

Experience

President

Klutch Software

Sep 2021 - Present • Remote

Founder of Klutch Software; architecting and delivering inventory management platforms for maritime & automotive clients with C#/.NET, Blazor, and Azure.

Architected Azure inventory ingestion pipelines (Data Factory + prior custom ETL) powering 80+ dealers with clear API contracts, validation, and monitoring.
Lead client data integration group—review designs, unblock engineers, and keep third-party integrations stable with dashboards and alerts.
Established CI/CD, observability (Splunk/Dynatrace), and production-readiness checks to improve deployment safety and time-to-recover.
Primary client-facing incident lead; calm under pressure and trusted to communicate with business stakeholders during off-hours events.

Developer Associate Manager

Accenture / Pillar Technology

Sep 2018 - Sep 2021 • Michigan, USA

Consultant for Ford and Intuit; led backend/frontend delivery for customer-facing platforms and high-visibility launches.

Tech lead for Ford Build-and-Price backend (Java/Kotlin/Spring, Angular/React) at 10–30 RPS and millions of daily calls; stabilized contracts and performance for Bronco and Mach-E launches.
Drove Splunk adoption (dashboards, metrics, alerting) to cut detection time and give product/ops visibility; created on-call playbooks for faster recoveries.
Coordinated multiple teams to balance feature delivery with resilience/latency goals; partnered with product/execs to keep launch timelines intact.
At Intuit, strengthened QuickBooks Online PPP flows (Java/React), aligning backend/frontend changes and guiding engineers through reviews and release gates.

Software Engineer

Amber Engine

Jul 2015 - Sep 2018 • Detroit, MI

Engineered data ingestion pipelines and retailer portals; led modernization to speed delivery and improve reliability for furniture manufacturers and retailers.

Designed ingestion/ETL and portals (Go, Angular/TS, Mongo) with data validation and API versioning standards.
Migrated deployments from EC2/Fabric to containers/serverless with CI/CD, improving release predictability and ops visibility.
Championed runbooks and monitoring to smooth onboarding and reduce production friction.

Software Engineer

Navigation Solutions

Mar 2013 - May 2015 • Bloomfield Hills, MI

Developed automated hardware and software testing solutions for GPS units in Hertz rental fleets; supported embedded navigation improvements.

Built hardware/software test rigs (Agilent Vee, C#) to raise release confidence.
Maintained Python POI packaging tools and debugged C/C++ navigation code with QA to close routing defects faster.