Alvin Robles Terrible

Engineering Lead | AI Subject Matter Expert

Email: alvin@terrible.nz

Phone: (+64) 2 2681 3404

Location: Hamilton, New Zealand

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-terrible-66b60341/

Website: alvin.terrible.nz

Experience: 18+ years

Professional Summary

Engineering Lead and AI Subject Matter Expert with 18 years of full-stack and frontend experience across telecommunications, banking, insurance and physical security. Leads frontend delivery on an enterprise access-control web client in TypeScript and React, sets the standards for AI-assisted engineering, and has led teams of up to 20 engineers and QAs. Track record in technical architecture, spec-driven delivery, mentoring, and shipping to production on Azure, Cloudflare and on-premise stacks.

Key Achievements

  • Engineering Lead at Gallagher Security on Command Centre Web, the browser client for an enterprise physical access control platform used by governments, airports, hospitals and critical infrastructure.
  • Team AI Subject Matter Expert: set the standards, guardrails and review practice for AI-assisted engineering, and coach engineers on using it without losing code quality.
  • Designed and maintain an agentic engineering toolkit of slash commands, skills, lifecycle hooks and automation scripts covering spec-driven development, pull request review, CI preflight and release documentation, governed by its own architecture decision records.
  • Built a local-first retrieval-augmented memory system (vector database, local embeddings, Model Context Protocol server) that grounds AI assistants in real project and personal context.
  • Led an Agile team of 20 (16 developers, 4 QAs) and served as software architect on three ground-up .NET Core and Angular products.
  • Reduced resource forecasts by 40% through test and delivery automation while holding quality steady.
  • Migrated critical banking applications from legacy VB6 to ASP.NET MVC as system architect and lead developer.

Work Experience

Engineering Lead - Frontend / AI Subject Matter Expert

August 2024 - Current

Gallagher Security · Hamilton, New Zealand

Lead frontend engineering on Command Centre Web, the browser client for Gallagher's enterprise physical access control platform, within the Experience Modernisation Web Client team. Also the team's AI Subject Matter Expert, owning how AI-assisted development is used on production code.

  • Lead delivery of frontend features in TypeScript, React, Redux Toolkit and Nx, from specification through code review to release.
  • Act as AI Subject Matter Expert: define the standards, guardrails and review practice for AI-assisted engineering, and coach engineers on using it without eroding code quality.
  • Built and maintain an internal agentic engineering toolkit of slash commands, skills, lifecycle hooks and automation scripts covering spec-driven development, automated pull request review, CI preflight checks and release documentation.
  • Author and maintain the architecture decision records governing that toolkit, including a credential-gate hook that enforces secret handling at the tool boundary.
  • Drive engineering standards across the web client: WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, internationalisation with Lingui and Crowdin, performance budgets, and dependency and CVE remediation.
  • Mentor and coach engineers through pair reviews, technical interviewing and spec-driven delivery practices.
  • Work across the Azure DevOps and GitHub toolchain, including GitHub Actions pipelines and Playwright end-to-end coverage.
Tech: TypeScript, React, Redux Toolkit, Angular, Nx, Tailwind CSS, Vite, Vitest, Playwright, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Model Context Protocol

Senior Developer

June 2023 - August 2024

Enlighten Designs Limited · Hamilton, New Zealand

Led delivery on client projects spanning programmatic video generation, applied machine learning and cloud data platforms for New Zealand and Australian customers.

  • Led a React and Remotion project for programmatic video generation, engineering a rendering pipeline that produced dynamic video content at scale.
  • Led an Australian client project combining ML.NET with the OpenAI API for automated data categorisation, integrated with Azure Managed Applications and Service Bus for high throughput.
  • Built a SharePoint synchronisation and backup service to external storage, running on Azure Functions with Cosmos DB.
  • Provisioned and managed cloud infrastructure as code with Terraform.
  • Worked directly with clients on scoping, estimation and technical direction.
Tech: C#, .NET Core, React, MUI, Remotion, ML.NET, OpenAI API, Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, Azure Service Bus, Terraform

Senior Software Engineer

February 2020 - April 2023

Willis Towers Watson · Philippines (global insurance broking and advisory)

Built and maintained insurance platform services for a global broking and risk advisory business, and coached junior and mid-level engineers.

  • Delivered features across an Angular and .NET Core microservices estate serving global insurance operations.
  • Guided and coached junior to mid-level developers through code review, pairing and technical design sessions.
  • Owned Azure DevOps pipelines, Application Insights observability and SQL database performance.
  • Implemented authentication and identity flows with Microsoft Azure AD B2C.
  • Led the introduction of new technologies into the platform, including Azure Data Factory pipelines.
Tech: C#, .NET Core, Angular, Azure AD B2C, Microservices, Azure DevOps, Azure Data Factory, Application Insights, SQL Server

Software Architect / Team Lead

October 2017 - February 2020

BlastAsia, Inc. · Philippines

Led an Agile team of 20 and acted as software architect on three ground-up product builds.

  • Managed an Agile team of 20 (16 developers, 4 QAs), covering delivery planning, capacity and career development.
  • Served as software architect for three greenfield products on .NET Core and Angular, owning solution design and technical standards.
  • Reduced resource forecasts by 40% through test and delivery automation while holding quality steady.
  • Ran the technical hiring and onboarding pipeline for the team.
Tech: C#, .NET Core, Angular, Azure, SQL Server, Agile / Scrum

Senior Programmer Analyst

February 2015 - October 2017

Metrobank · Philippines (banking)

System architect and lead developer on core banking applications, including a full legacy modernisation programme.

  • Acted as system architect and lead developer on the CLIF project for a major commercial bank.
  • Modernised legacy VB6 applications to ASP.NET MVC without interrupting banking operations.
  • Led a team of 6 developers through design, delivery and release.
  • Worked to banking security, audit and change-control standards.
Tech: C#, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, SQL Server

Selected Projects

Agentic Engineering Toolkit for Claude Code

2024 - present

Creator and maintainer

A personal, project-aware toolkit that turns AI coding assistants into a governed part of the delivery pipeline. 46 slash commands, 42 skills, 17 lifecycle hooks and 68 automation scripts cover spec-driven development, automated pull request review, CI preflight checks, release documentation and security gates, steered per project by a descriptor registry so one toolkit serves every repository.

Tech: Claude Code, Model Context Protocol, Node.js, TypeScript, PowerShell, GitHub Actions

me-brain - Local-First RAG Memory for AI Assistants

2025 - present

Architect and developer

A private retrieval-augmented generation system that gives AI assistants grounded, personal context. A Node/TypeScript CLI and MCP stdio server over a LanceDB vector store, embedded locally by Ollama so nothing leaves the machine. Separate corpora for facts, personal voice and third-party messages are never blended, and every ingestion path runs through a redaction gate with quarantine for high-confidence secret hits.

Tech: TypeScript, Node.js, LanceDB, Ollama (bge-m3 embeddings), Model Context Protocol, Azure Cosmos DB

Command Centre Web - Enterprise Access Control Client

2024 - present

Engineering Lead (Frontend)

Frontend delivery lead on the browser client for Gallagher's physical access control platform, used to run security operations for governments, airports, hospitals and critical infrastructure. Work spans feature delivery in a large monorepo, accessibility to WCAG 2.1 AA, internationalisation through Lingui and Crowdin, performance budgets and end-to-end coverage in Playwright.

Tech: TypeScript, React, Redux Toolkit / RTK Query, Nx, Tailwind CSS, Vite, Vitest, Playwright

AI Enablement Programme - AI-Assisted Engineering Adoption

2024 - present

AI Subject Matter Expert

The people side of AI-assisted engineering: standards, guardrails and coaching that let a team use generative AI on production code without eroding quality. Covers instruction and skill authoring, prompt and context design, automated AI code review, secret-handling policy, and the review practice that decides what AI-generated code is allowed to ship.

Tech: GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Model Context Protocol, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps

AI Data Categorisation Platform

2023 - 2024

Project lead

Led delivery of a data categorisation platform for an Australian client that combined a trained ML.NET model with the OpenAI API, so cheap deterministic classification handled the bulk and the language model handled the ambiguous tail. Integrated with Azure Managed Applications and Service Bus for high-throughput processing.

Tech: ML.NET, OpenAI API, C#, .NET Core, Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus, Cosmos DB

Programmatic Video Generation Pipeline

2023 - 2024

Project lead

Led a project that generated video programmatically from React components using the Remotion library, turning structured content into rendered video without a manual editing step. Engineered a rendering pipeline that handled dynamic, data-driven scenes at scale.

Tech: React, Remotion, TypeScript, C#, .NET Core, Azure

alvin.terrible.nz - Edge-Rendered Portfolio

2025

Designer and developer

This site. A React single-page app prerendered to static HTML at build time and served from Cloudflare's edge as one deploy unit, with a Hono API owning the contact endpoint. Migrated off Azure Static Web Apps and .NET Functions; structured data, a generated sitemap and an llms.txt summary make it legible to search engines and AI crawlers that never run JavaScript.

Tech: React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS v4, Hono, Cloudflare Workers, Vitest

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering

2003-2008

Rizal Technological University, Philippines

Received a Loyalty Award

Technical Proficiency

AI & Agentic Engineering

  • Claude Code
  • GitHub Copilot
  • Prompt & context engineering
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Vector databases & embeddings
  • AI code review & governance
  • OpenAI API
  • ML.NET

Frontend Engineering

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Redux Toolkit / RTK Query
  • Angular
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Vite
  • Nx monorepos
  • Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA)
  • Internationalisation (Lingui, Crowdin)

Backend & Data

  • C# / .NET Core
  • ASP.NET Core Web API
  • Node.js
  • Hono / edge runtimes
  • Entity Framework Core
  • SQL Server
  • Cosmos DB
  • Microservices & REST API design

Cloud, DevOps & Platform

  • Azure (Functions, Service Bus, Data Factory, B2C)
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • GitHub Actions CI/CD
  • Azure DevOps Pipelines
  • Docker
  • Terraform / Bicep (IaC)
  • Observability & Application Insights

Quality & Testing

  • Vitest / unit testing
  • React Testing Library
  • Playwright end-to-end testing
  • Test-driven development
  • Code review & static analysis
  • Dependency & CVE remediation

Leadership & Delivery

  • Engineering leadership
  • Mentoring & coaching
  • Technical architecture
  • Spec-driven development
  • Agile / Scrum delivery
  • Technical interviewing & hiring
  • Stakeholder communication

References

Roselle Teofilo

People Manager

Gallagher Security

(+64) 2 10 826 1379

Nishat Soudagar

Senior Project Manager

Enlighten Designs Ltd.

(+64) 2 7244 2259

Drew Singson

Social Worker

New Zealand

(+64) 2 7730 0983

Jerom Balbuena

Technical Lead

Willis Towers Watson (US)

(+1) 267 206 9990

Orson Visande

Software Architect

Solvento

(+63) 917 311 1104

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Alvin "Art" Terrible?
Alvin "Art" Terrible is an Engineering Lead and AI Subject Matter Expert based in Hamilton, New Zealand. He has 18+ years of software engineering experience across telecommunications, banking, insurance and physical security, and currently leads frontend engineering on Command Centre Web at Gallagher Security.
What does Art do as an AI Subject Matter Expert?
He sets the standards, guardrails and review practice for AI-assisted engineering, coaches engineers on using it safely on production code, and builds the tooling behind it: an agentic toolkit of slash commands, skills, lifecycle hooks and automation scripts covering spec-driven development, automated pull request review and CI preflight checks.
What is Art's technology stack?
Day to day: TypeScript, React, Redux Toolkit, Nx, Tailwind CSS and Vite on the frontend; C#/.NET Core, Node.js and Hono on the backend; SQL Server and Cosmos DB for data; Azure and Cloudflare Workers for hosting; Vitest, React Testing Library and Playwright for testing; and GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Model Context Protocol servers for AI-assisted engineering.
Has Art led engineering teams?
Yes. He is currently an Engineering Lead at Gallagher Security, previously led an Agile team of 20 (16 developers and 4 QAs) as Software Architect and Team Lead at BlastAsia, and led a team of 6 developers at Metrobank as system architect on a core banking modernisation.
How many years of experience does Art have?
He started his professional software career in 2008, giving him more than 18 years of production experience as of 2026, spanning full-stack development, software architecture and engineering leadership.
Where is Art based, and does he work remotely?
He is based in Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand, and has worked with distributed teams across New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines and the United States.
What kind of work is Art interested in?
Engineering leadership, frontend architecture and AI enablement: helping teams adopt AI-assisted development without losing engineering rigour. He is currently at Gallagher Security; enquiries are welcome through the contact form on this site.
How can I contact Alvin Terrible?
Through the contact form at https://alvin.terrible.nz/contact, by email at alvin@terrible.nz, or on LinkedIn. A downloadable PDF CV is available at https://alvin.terrible.nz/AlvinTerribleCV.pdf.