Senior Software Engineer
Software Engineer. Builder. Technologist.
Twenty years across infrastructure, software engineering, architecture, and engineering leadership — and I still write software every day. Lately that includes AI-assisted development, agentic systems, and local models.
Right now
Day job
Senior full-stack engineering and application modernization, with real ownership over delivery — understanding complex, long-running systems and evolving them using modern engineering tools and practices.
Personal project
A local-first, agentic content system running on Apple Silicon. Multiple AI personas, each with its own niche, and a human reviewing everything before it goes out.
See how it worksFounder
An independent technology company I founded, building websites and software for clients.
agentictdx.comFeatured project
A local-first agentic content system, built to understand what running one end-to-end actually takes.
Piston generates written content and images for AI personas, each with its own niche and now brand context. The core workflow runs on local hardware rather than a cloud AI service, and nothing publishes without a human reviewing it first.
Since DOS 5.0
Not a resume. The progression itself — self-taught kid, systems, code, architecture, teams, and back to building — is the point.
1998 – 2004
My first computer ran DOS 5.0. I was 11, playing Oregon Trail and writing batch scripts just to draw a smiley face on screen — building things before it was a career plan. That turned into a real job in 1998, as a Network Administrator at a satellite company. When the company folded, I couldn’t get back into tech without a degree, so I spent several years in welding and machine shop work instead. In 2004 I decided to go back to school.
2006 – 2013
College led back into tech: a support role at XO Communications in 2006, then hosting and technical support at InMotion Hosting, followed by field engineering and IT management. Networks, Linux systems, security — the infrastructure underneath every application, back when "infrastructure" wasn’t yet its own career track.
2013 – 2020
Shifted deliberately into building software: enterprise web applications and systems administration at ECPI University, then full-stack engineering at Education Advanced — C#, .NET, APIs, databases, and the discipline that keeps production systems honest.
2020 – 2025
Took on Engineering Manager and later senior technology leadership at Education Advanced — eventually responsible for engineering, IT, infrastructure, and the company’s AI and ML direction, working directly with executives while staying close to architecture decisions.
2025 – Present
Moved deliberately back into hands-on engineering: a distributed-systems contract at Lonza — .NET Aspire, Blazor WebAssembly, RabbitMQ, SignalR — and now Senior Software Engineer II at WebstaurantStore. Same depth, closer to the code.
Now
Founded AgenticTDX and built Piston in my own time, applying two decades of infrastructure-through-leadership experience to AI-assisted engineering, local models, and agentic systems.
How I work
Frameworks come and go. The distributed system, the data model, and the failure modes underneath them are what actually determine whether something works. I spend real time understanding what’s already there before I touch it — especially on modernization work.
Not for the resume, not for what’s trending. .NET, Python, a message bus, a local LLM — the right tool depends on what you’re actually trying to do.
A design that looks clean on a whiteboard and falls over in production isn’t a good design. I think about how something runs, fails, and gets debugged at the same time I think about how it’s built.
I use Claude and other LLM tooling regularly — to explore unfamiliar systems and run parts of Piston. It’s another engineering tool, and it earns its place the way any tool does: by being useful.
That was true of distributed systems in 2015, and it’s true of local LLMs and agent orchestration now. Piston exists because reading about agentic systems only gets you so far.
Selected technologies
.NET / C# · .NET Aspire · Blazor · MudBlazor · Python · TypeScript · React · APIs
Distributed systems · Messaging · WolverineFx · RabbitMQ · SignalR · Caching · Redis · SQL Server · PostgreSQL · YARP
AWS · Azure · Docker · Kubernetes · Terraform · CI/CD · Observability · Keycloak
Claude · OpenAI · Ollama · Local LLMs · n8n · FastAPI agent services · RAG · Prompt engineering · Agent orchestration
About
Tim Dyer has spent about twenty years working across technology — starting in hosting and technical support, moving through systems administration and field engineering, and eventually into full-stack software engineering with C# and .NET.
Along the way he managed engineering teams and operated at senior technology leadership levels, working directly with executives on architecture, technology strategy, and AI and ML direction. He's most energized, though, solving a hard technical problem and shipping the software that comes out of it — which is a large part of why he moved back into hands-on engineering roles.
Today he's a Senior Software Engineer II at WebstaurantStore, where he works on application modernization using modern engineering tools and practices. He also founded AgenticTDX, an independent technology company building websites and software for clients, and builds Piston, a local-first AI content system, in his own time.
Get in touch
Best reached by email or LinkedIn.