Kyle Neal

Lead Distributed Systems Engineer

10+ years building and owning revenue-critical, high-throughput production systems on the BEAM. Erlang/OTP, Elixir, Phoenix LiveView, and distributed data architecture at scale.

What I Bring

10+ Years on the BEAM 5 Engineers Led & Mentored End-to-End Platform Ownership

Systems I've Built

Supported 10M+ daily events Powered $2.5M+/mo Revenue Enabled ~25% Lower Infra Cost
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Get in Touch
GitHub nealkyle5@gmail.com

Career Highlights

Curated highlights for a quick read — full experience and detail available in my resume.

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Primary Career Role

Lead Distributed Systems Engineer

Ionik (formerly VeriAS)

October 2014 — March 2026
  • Architected, built, and ultimately owned a revenue-critical affiliate network platform in Erlang/OTP, replacing HitPath and scaling it to support $2.5M+ monthly revenue and 1.5M+ events/day, spanning initial development, multi-team expansion, and full system ownership and rewrite.
  • Built NetAdmin in Elixir, Phoenix LiveView, and Ash Framework as the internal platform for orchestration, monitoring, auditability, and cross-system automation. Enabled ~25% reduction in company infrastructure costs.
  • Designed and operated the data and reporting stack across Cassandra, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, PostgreSQL, and Spark on AWS EMR while leading 5 engineers and reducing infrastructure spend by roughly 25%.

Application Programmer

CGI Federal

December 2013 — October 2014
  • Analyzed enterprise Java and ADA codebases and supported tooling plus build and release workflows for multi-million-line systems.

In-House Technician

Wichita Online

April 2013 — December 2013
  • Handled in-field and remote network troubleshooting plus wireless equipment deployment for production ISP infrastructure.

Computer Science Tutor

Academic Tutoring

See Resume
  • Provided one-on-one computer science tutoring with a focus on programming fundamentals, problem solving, and helping students work through technical course material.

Career Portfolio

From deep systems work to large-scale platform ownership and leadership.
Click a phase to explore the systems and projects behind it.

Technical Expertise

BEAM & Languages

  • Erlang/OTP
  • Elixir (Phoenix + LiveView + Ash Framework)
  • BEAM VM tuning & relup zero-downtime upgrades
  • REST API design & third-party integrations
  • Distributed systems design (clustering, fault tolerance, supervision)
  • Real-time systems & high-throughput processing

Data & Messaging

  • RabbitMQ distributed messaging pipelines
  • PostgreSQL / SQL data modeling and optimization
  • Elasticsearch / OpenSearch analytics
  • Cassandra
  • Apache Spark (AWS EMR, scala)
  • Time-series data modeling (10M+ events/day)

Infrastructure & DevOps

  • Production Infrastructure (AWS, fly.io)
  • Infrastructure as Code (Ansible, CI/CD Pipelines)
  • VPS Provisioning & Deployment Automation
  • Infrastructure Cost Optimization
  • Docker & Containerization
  • Linux Systems Administration
  • Observability & Reliability Engineering

Independent Projects

Beyond production systems, I continue to build and deploy independent projects exploring new ideas and technologies.

Click a project to explore

Completed Projects

Featured Work

Production-ready launches, deployed experiments, and supporting projects that round out the broader portfolio.

Hardcore Handyman preview
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Hardcore Handyman

Full-stack Elixir lead-generation platform with SEO-driven service pages, conversion-focused design, and admin interface. Generated more inbound demand than the business could operationally support.

Elixir Phoenix LiveView Ecto Swoosh Fly.io

https://hardcorehandyman.fly.dev/

In Progress Projects

In Progress

Active projects currently under development. These highlight ongoing system design, architecture decisions, and evolving features.

Leadership & Teamwork

Technical leadership across distributed teams, from architecting production systems to mentoring engineers and coordinating cross-functional delivery.

Architecture ownership across all production systems
Mentored & managed 5 engineers across backend and infrastructure
Coordinated frontend, backend & infrastructure teams
Scaled platforms to $2.5M+ monthly revenue
Managed delivery timelines, releases & incident response
Hands-on across backend, full-stack & DevOps delivery

Affiliate Platform Team

Poland-based backend & DevOps collaboration

  • Collaborated with 5 backend, 3 DevOps engineers, and 2 frontend engineers to build a multi-million-dollar affiliate network platform.
  • Partnered with 2 lead engineers on architecture and initial production launch, then became the sole owner for features, maintenance, and major rewrites. Ultimately rewrote more of the system than the original team-built release contained.
  • Led the NetAdmin platform rewrite, initially building the foundation independently, then mentoring junior Elixir engineers on scoped features, and ultimately driving the system to full production completion as the primary owner.

Infrastructure Team

Built & led a self-managed ops team

  • Built a Philippines-based infrastructure team to operate as a self-managed unit with the structure and autonomy to run independently.
  • Balanced delegation with hands-on involvement during high-pressure delivery periods, keeping the team sustainable and operationally independent.

Education

B.S. Computer Science

Cameron University

2010 — 2014

Magna Cum Laude

A.S. Information Technology

Cameron University

2012 — 2014

Magna Cum Laude

When I'm Not Coding

Playing Guitar
Mountain Biking
Hiking
Going on Adventures
Learning New Things

Let's Talk

Looking for an engineer?

Open to the right distributed systems or platform engineering opportunity.

Get in Touch
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Need consulting or project work?

I occasionally take on consulting and small project engagements.

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View the Source Code

This portfolio site is open source. Check out the code on GitHub to see how it's built with Phoenix LiveView.

View on GitHub