Anton Panteleev

Senior Software Engineer | Backend and guardrails for AI agents | Kotlin, Rails, Python

Melbourne, Australia | Australian citizen | E-3 visa eligible (USA)

Summary

Backend engineer for AI agents: builds the tool endpoints and authorization that Culture Amp’s AI Coach (a LangGraph agent) calls in production; five years of event-driven Kotlin and Rails services on AWS.
Builds with and for agents: designed a multi-agent Claude harness my team adopted, ships product tool layers over MCP, speaks on prompt engineering, RAG and MCP; founded and ran a startup.

AI & agents: LangGraph and LangChain, tool and permission backends for LangGraph agents (AI Coach), multi-agent Claude Code harness design, MCP servers and tool layers, prompt and context engineering
Languages & frameworks: Kotlin/Ktor, Ruby on Rails, Python, React, GraphQL, SQL, RSpec, Jest
Data & messaging: PostgreSQL, Flyway, Kafka, SQS FIFO, Kinesis, background jobs and queueing theory
Cloud: AWS (ECS Fargate, Lambda, Step Functions, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Kinesis, Aurora Postgres, S3, Secrets Manager), CDK and Terraform, Docker, BuildKite, GitHub Actions
Observability & auth: Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Sentry, Okta, Cerbos
Practices: TDD and pairing (XP), design docs and ADRs, code review, mentoring

2026.APR-Present Culture Amp, Senior Software Engineer. Melbourne, AUS

Tool backend for AI Coach. Senior engineer on Multi-Source Insights, the Kotlin/Ktor service Coach’s LangGraph agent calls for turnover-risk insights over survey, performance and demographic data; drove its authorization, architecture hardening and admin APIs; reviewed 100+ PRs.
Agent guardrails. Designed the Cerbos policy-as-code authorization that scopes each Coach tool call to the leader’s permitted population and demographic tier
Production tool endpoints. Shipped the v2 insight endpoints Coach invokes as tools (turnover-risk hotspots for high performers), plus a fail-closed allowlist for sensitive demographics.
Multi-agent harness. Designed the team’s Claude Code harness (13 role agents, 5 agent teams, skills, rules, hooks); used it for LLM-augmented PR reviews and a team-verified refactoring assessment.
Cross-team delivery. Owned sales-demo data end to end, from Solution Preview to a flag-gated AWS Step Function integration across three teams, so demo accounts can hold Coach conversations.
Reliability. Matured the SQS FIFO job runner (job-outcome contract, idempotency keying)

2025.SEP-2025.DEC Marketplacer, Senior Software Engineer. Melbourne, AUS

Integrated Airwallex payments and account reconciliation (Rails, React, GraphQL) for a marketplace with millions of shoppers.

2023.OCT-2025.JUL Fresho, Software Engineer. Melbourne, AUS

Built event-driven cashflow-forecasting services for a B2B food-ordering platform (AUS/UK).

2021.NOV-2023.AUG Zepto (fintech, Series A 2022), Software Engineer. Melbourne, AUS

Built anti-money-laundering and financial-crime systems (Rails/PostgreSQL); led ISO 27001 hardening.

2021.MAY-2021.NOV ReadyTech, Software Engineer. Melbourne, AUS

Built a student psychometric assessment platform and the AWS pipeline feeding its ML scoring.

2009-2020 FloatCulture (founder) / CBRE / RCP, Founder; Client-side Project Manager

Founded and ran FloatCulture, a float centre startup in Auckland; managed multi-million dollar projects for investment funds.

Speaker at Ruby Melbourne / Ruby on Rails Oceania: prompt engineering, RAG and MCP live-coded in Ruby (2025); OpenTelemetry (2023); Demystifying Rails (2024). Blog: friendlyantz.me.

2011 Master of Project Management (Distinction), Auckland University of Technology

2004-2009 Master of Engineering, Moscow State University of Civil Engineering