Available · Orem, UT
Addison Hellum · Mid-Level AI Engineer

For OpenSide. AI-native engineer.

18 years of engineering — from robotics research to music distribution tools that drove 3 billion+ song plays for major record labels. Based in Orem, ten minutes from your office.

addisonhellum@gmail.com · LinkedIn · 808-773-4646

By the numbers

3B+
Song plays on Spotify, Apple Music & other DSPs driven by distribution tools I built at Starling
$10M+
Revenue generated by products I engineered
0
Years coding — started 2008, age 8
6
Engineers I recruited and led as Principal at Starling

Experience

Where I've worked.

Starling
Principal Software Engineer · Remote
Jun 2020 — Jul 2025
  • Built music distribution and promotion tools that drove 3B+ song plays across Spotify, Apple Music, and other DSPs for clients' catalogs; reduced reporting query latency 60% through partitioning and columnar formats.
  • Recruited and led a six-person distributed team — implemented sprint cadences, code-review culture, and CI/CD pipelines aligned to product metrics.
  • Built campaign and distribution automation that cut manual workload ~80% and scaled song ingestion to 1,000+ per day.
  • Assembled a 1.2B+ record dataset of video metadata and trained ML models to forecast virality, helping clients optimize marketing spend across campaigns; products generated $10M+ in revenue.
Node.js Python TypeScript PostgreSQL AWS (S3, Glue, Redshift, Athena) AI / ML CI/CD Team Leadership
University of Hawaiʻi — RAN Lab
Software Engineer · Honolulu, HI
May 2019 — May 2020
  • Implemented monocular odometry in OpenCV/C++ for mapping drones under strict SWaP constraints.
  • Contributed algorithms and data pipelines used by subsequent lab research.
C++ OpenCV Robotics Data Pipelines
Hypixel Studios
Software Engineer · Remote
May 2017 — Feb 2019
  • Built and maintained core libraries and tooling adopted by 20+ engineers for rapid game development.
  • Automated CI/CD pipelines cutting deployment time ~30%; developed profiling tools surfacing production bottlenecks.
Java CI/CD Dev Tooling Profiling

Capabilities

Skills mapped to
OpenSide's stack.

Every technology from the role description, rated honestly.

Node.js
Primary back-end runtime across every project for the past 5 years. Job queue workers, APIs, automation.
Daily driver
React / JavaScript
Built production frontends — internal dashboards, tooling, and customer-facing interfaces.
Comfortable
AI SDK & Tools
Hands-on with Claude API, OpenAI platform, agentic architectures, job queue workers, and AI-native product development.
This is my lane
PostgreSQL & Data Modeling
Schema design, indexing strategy, RPC functions, partitioning. Ran infra processing billions of records.
Deep experience
CI/CD & Testing
GitHub Actions pipelines, quality gates, deployment automation at Starling and Hypixel. Code-review culture.
Practiced
Astro / Tailwind
Familiar with the framework; actively picking it up for new projects.
Picking up fast
Cloudflare Workers
Understand edge compute concepts well from serverless and distributed systems work.
Familiar
Python & Data Engineering
Primary language at Starling. Data pipelines, ML model training, Pandas, AWS Glue and Athena.
Expert
System Design & Reliability
SLOs, failover, incident response, A/B testing, observability. Led architecture decisions for 5 years.
Senior-level

Education

Brigham Young University–Hawaii
B.S. Computer Science · Minor in Entrepreneurship
Completed while working full-time at Starling
Aug 2018 — Dec 2022

Certifications

Verified skills.

Top 10% is the highest tier TestDome awards. All four are independently verifiable.


Why this role

Reading the job listing on the OpenSide website, it genuinely sounds like my dream role. I love working with AI. I love bootstrapped. I love founders who are technical. I love hybrid with face-to-face interaction. I love Utah!

I'm a quick learner and am very detail-oriented (a bit OCD, but I believe it works in my favor). I may not be a junior developer, but I am still hungry and excited to build the immensely impressive things that modern AI enables.

Excited to meet you and to learn!
Addison Hellum
Addison Hellum
addisonhellum@gmail.com · 808-773-4646

Ready when
you are.

No formal process needed — just a conversation. Email, call, or LinkedIn.