Kyle C. R. Fahey

GARDE12025 – present

Founder

Set the company’s strategy from a competitive teardown of Vanta, Delve and Drata, then built the product, brand and platform to match it.

• Built the company’s product end to end: thesis, brand, design, marketing site and engineering.
• 8,731 commits across a C#/.NET endpoint agent, a Go backend, and a TypeScript frontend and connector runtime.
• Invented PWTL, a task language for auditable AI judgments, and a document system that explains every statement it generates (both patent pending), plus Locus, a protocol that gives AI a map of the product so it can guide non-technical users by chat.
• Set the strategy from a competitive analysis of Vanta, Delve and Drata; turned 27+ navigation items into the states of a GRC.

Litehouse2024 – present

Staff Product Engineer

Designed the multi-tenant system and architected the federated GraphQL service across the data warehouse and application data, turning trial systems into a product; led the Auth0 migration and audited a $6M PwC contract.

• One of five engineers chosen from thirty-three to turn a smart-district platform, proven at the Honda Center, into a commercial product.
• Owned backend architecture for the commercialization effort: designed the multi-tenant system, redesigned 40+ domain relationships, and architected the federated GraphQL service across our backends, spanning both the data warehouse and application data, to turn legacy trial systems into a scalable product platform.
• Designed and led the platform-wide Auth0 migration, modernizing authentication and authorization across services for security, maintainability and enterprise readiness.
• Developed and productionized RAG pipelines (vector and semantic search, OpenAI models, Python in Azure Synapse, TypeScript and Node.js) for natural-language querying over GraphQL-backed platform data; after auditing PwC’s pipeline, rebuilt it with a temporal engine, a trimmed schema and a skills-based semantic layer in an agentic loop.
• Invented an in-house framework on top of NestJS that adds MSSQL tables to the platform mechanically, and built the patterns and developer tooling around it to standardize backend development and speed delivery across distributed product teams.
• Audited part of PwC’s $6M platform delivery before we accepted it, while serving as the primary backend and GitHub Actions CI/CD expert, mentoring engineers and improving platform stability, delivery quality and SOC 2 readiness.

OC Sports & Entertainment (Anaheim Ducks)2022 – 2024

Senior Product Engineer

When the planned framework wouldn’t be ready, changed the platform and trained 30+ engineers on it to ship the Ducks’ fan experience on time.

• Owned the backend TypeScript and NestJS codebase and set its quality bar: authored the house code guide and reviewed every pull request (1,000+), refusing to merge until it met the bar.
• Mentored an offshore team of 30 engineers in India through technical 1:1s.
• Audited Aegis, an open-source backend module federation framework, and wrote its stability and developer-experience roadmap; when it wouldn’t be ready for the Ducks’ new fan-experience app, pivoted to NestJS, trained 30+ engineers across the US and India, and shipped on time.
• Designed the backend architecture and the real-time game-notifications pipeline on Azure Event Hub, working through live-scoring data integrity.
• Designed authentication and authorization (ABAC, JWT) with integrations including Ticketmaster; led adoption of Datadog and GitHub Actions.

AbbVie (Allē)2020 – 2022

Senior Software Engineer

Convinced leadership to change the search architecture, led the implementation in Elasticsearch and Go, and helped make the case for, then create, the council that governs every schema change.

• Convinced leadership to adopt Elasticsearch over Postgres for provider search, and built the search service behind alle.com, with 2M+ monthly visitors.
• Architected the core Provider service in Go (Postgres and PostGIS, gRPC, GraphQL) within a federated graph of 20+ services.
• Helped voice the need for, then co-founded, the GraphQL Council, which sets schema standards and reviews every change across the graph.
• Taught Go to 60+ engineers through talks, workshops and written guides, and made the case for an opinionated language: a large team ships faster when the code is predictable.

Pangea.app (YC W21)2021 – 2022

Independent consultant, advisor to the CTO

Diagnosed a crashing platform as missing practice, not a people problem, and took it to 99.9% uptime.

• Mentored the non-technical founding CTO on architecture, infrastructure and practice.
• Took the platform from several crashes a day to 99.9% uptime: WebSockets to HTTP, slow calls onto queues, RethinkDB to Postgres.
• Made tests and pull-request reviews how the team worked.
• Led the move to TypeScript, linting and tracing, cutting bugs shipped.

Hoopla2020

Senior Software Engineer

• Led a new Rails microservice publishing notifications to Microsoft Teams.
• Added a “fan” role across 13 microservices so colleagues could celebrate sales wins.

The Thought & Expression Co. (Thought Catalog)2017 – 2020

Software Engineer

• Helped sustain growth as revenue rose 300% in my first year, while improving uptime and performance; 300+ production deployments.
• Cut AWS costs 40% with no downtime; re-indexed MySQL for an 85% speedup; made Laravel controllers 60% faster.
• Built recurring payments (Stripe, Authorize.net, ACH), an Elasticsearch recommendation engine and MongoDB disaster recovery.
• Paired Elasticsearch with Ahrefs data to match existing content to trends; built a Slack bot that ran editorial workflows.

LabRecruit2019

Independent consultant

• Built a pipeline that found specialist engineers from public GitHub activity, verified contact details, matched professional profiles and indexed them for search. LabRecruit later sold it to another agency.

Elexa Consumer Products2017

Full-stack developer (contract)

• Designed and built an e-commerce checkout customers called “the easiest checkout ever,” on a headless CMS with a Vue cart.