Gary Dotzlaw

Gary Dotzlaw

Senior Software Architect & AI Systems Engineer

35 years of hands-on development — from bare-metal assembly to orchestrating multi-agent AI systems. I've shipped production software for 100+ companies across North America, through every major paradigm shift: desktop, client-server, web, cloud, and now agentic AI.

My current focus is the infrastructure layer that makes agentic AI reliable in production: swarm architecture, defense-in-depth security, and a migration methodology that moves legacy codebases into modern AI frameworks. The Bootstrap Framework — an agent swarm that builds agent swarms — is validated across 3 production projects, with each migration completing faster than the last.

When I'm not in the code: fishing, woodworking, and photography.

My Skills

Claude Code Agent Architecture

Designing specialized AI agent teams with defined file ownership boundaries, tool restrictions, and embedded quality hooks. Experience with the lead-teammate pattern, 9 agent roles across 3 production projects.

Agentic AI Security

Applying the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications: 22-pattern prompt injection detection, two-tier scan enforcement, rate limiting circuit breakers, secrets hygiene (SEC-01–05), and the Dotzlaw 3-tier trajectory monitoring protocol.

Python Backend Engineering

FastAPI with Pydantic models, asyncio.TaskGroup, centralized PostgreSQL connection pooling, full type annotations. Experience migrating monolithic architectures to modular router-based designs. Modern Python typing throughout.

AI Pipeline Engineering

Multi-step AI processing pipelines with Claude API, OpenAI embeddings, Qdrant vector search (two-stage retrieval), BaseLLMClient abstraction, WebSocket progress reporting, and classified error recovery.

SQL and Data Engineering

Expert-level SQL across MS SQL Server and PostgreSQL: multi-tenant query systems, view-centric architecture, T-SQL dialect specifics, natural language to SQL pipeline design with schema retrieval via vector search.

React and TypeScript Frontend

React 19 with React Query, TypeScript strict mode, shadcn/ui, Metabase SDK embedding, real-time WebSocket integration, Astro 5 + Svelte 5 + Tailwind CSS 3 for static sites. tsc --noEmit enforced on every write.

Hook Engineering and Automation

Building deterministic quality gates: PreToolUse safety gates (72+ destructive command patterns), PostToolUse quality enforcement (ruff, tsc, Biome, artifact validation), Stop hooks (full test suite). additionalContext for self-correction.

Domain Knowledge Extraction

Transforming codebase knowledge into Claude Code skills via progressive disclosure. From metabase-server migration: 7 skills, 1,486 lines covering 7-step SQL workflow, view-centric patterns, LLM client abstraction. 140x token efficiency.

CMS and Static Site Migration

SQL dump parsing via state machine, Elementor JSON walking, HTML-to-Markdown conversion, Yoast SEO metadata preservation. Extracted 1,893 WordPress posts to find 41 published articles across 3 categories.

Astro and Modern Static Sites

Astro 5 with Svelte 5, Tailwind CSS 3, Vercel deployment, Pagefind search, Biome linting. Content collections with Zod schema validation, partial hydration for performance, pnpm workspaces.

Servoy Development

Two decades of enterprise business application development with Servoy. Complex form hierarchies, data provider patterns, JavaScript business logic. Current: integrating Servoy with AI — natural language interfaces, automated reports.

RAG Systems and Knowledge Graphs

5-stage YouTube-to-notes pipeline producing 2,757 bidirectional links and RAG chatbot at 2.5s with source attribution for $1.50 total. Text-to-SQL RAG: vector search over production reports achieves 92–95% accuracy on complex schemas.

The Next Generation

Continuing the work — two more developers building at the intersection of AI, data, and software.

Interested in working together?

Get in Touch →