Most software problems aren't hard because of the code.

They're hard because of everything around it: data you're not allowed to move, rules that differ for every customer, numbers that have to be defensible to someone who isn't in the room. That's the work I take.

Based in Chicago; available for fractional and project engagements.

Ten years across regulated healthcare, enterprise multi-tenancy, LLM product work, and financial reporting under private-equity scrutiny.

Epic Systems · WorldQuant
Founding engineer, CuroWork

01 Selected work

Selected engineering work.

Multi-tenant workforce visibility

CuroWork

Founding engineer

CuroWork helps finance and back-office teams plan work, see bottlenecks, and compare expected effort with what actually happened. I owned the platform end to end, from its multi-tenant data model and bidirectional calendar sync to production LLM features. In one customer workflow, month-end close fell from 20 days to 12 in three months.

  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • PostgreSQL
  • Supabase
  • LLM features
14 concurrent B2B contracts
Read the case study: CuroWork

Clinical scheduling & patient history

Epic Systems

Software Engineer → Engineering Manager

I led the Patient History team through a full rewrite, then took on Provider/Nurse Scheduling: the primary clinical entry point for Epic's Ambulatory users. There is no maintenance window where a hospital stops seeing patients.

  • Healthcare
  • Data modeling
  • Multi-tenancy
  • Team leadership
Solved critical upgrade issue for 30%+ of the customer base via a simple override mechanism
Read the case study: Epic Systems

A PE-acquired B2B SaaS company

Reporting infrastructure

Business intelligence consultant

After an acquisition, the reporting a company runs on internally is rarely the reporting its sponsor needs. I translated Salesforce CPQ contract and amendment rules into consistent financial reporting models.

  • Snowflake
  • Tableau
  • Salesforce CPQ
  • SQL
One governed source of truth for ARR, P&L, and balance sheet
Read the case study: Reporting infrastructure

iOS podcasting & creator payouts

Podder

Founder and sole engineer

Paying creators pro-rata by listening duration is a metering and settlement problem, not a feature. Getting the money right is where consumer products with revenue sharing usually break.

  • Swift / iOS
  • Node.js
  • MongoDB
  • Angular
  • Payments
Native iOS product shipped to the App Store
Read the case study: Podder
Built with

TypeScript · React · Next.js · Node.js · Angular · Swift / iOS · C# / .NET
PostgreSQL · Supabase · MongoDB · Snowflake · Tableau · AWS · Vercel
LLM integration · Structured extraction · Embeddings & semantic retrieval

The stack explains how these systems were built.The constraints explain why they were hard:

CuroWork
Epic
Reporting
Podder
Regulated / clinical data
no
yes
no
no
Rules differ per tenant
yes
yes
no
no
Continuity of live operations
yes
yes
yes
no
Money has to reconcile
no
no
yes
yes
Third-party APIs disagree
yes
no
yes
yes
End-to-end technical ownership
yes
no
yes
yes

02 About

Ten years, mostly on hard constraints.

Kai Russo

I'm an engineer in Chicago. I spent three years at Epic Systems leading teams on Patient History and Provider/Nurse Scheduling, left to build products as a founding engineer, and now work independently.

I work best where the constraints are real: compliance, scale, a data model that can't be rolled back, or a number that has to survive a diligence process. Earlier, I built equity-allocation models for WorldQuant across US, European, and Asian markets, and was selected as one of the top three US consultants for the 2015 World Summit.

B.A. Mathematics & Computer Science, minor in Economics @ Boston University.

CareVeritas

Risk scoring and simulation helping financial advisors model client exposure to family-caregiving costs.

WorldQuant

Equity-allocation models on fundamental and price/volume data, deployed out-of-sample across three continents.

A little more personal

Away from the screen.

I paint in my spare time, mostly with mixed media. Here are a few pieces and some photos of how they came together. I also speak three languages:

Selected works
Mixed media2022
Block Island, Selected state
04 / 04Selected state

03 Contact

Tell me what's stuck.

Let's decide what's worth building before the estimate, not after.

mail@kairusso.com Chicago, IL - remote