Curriculum Vitae

Charles Pinnix

Engineer · Designer · AI Product Leader

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Mission

My mission is to lead the development of AI-powered products inside large, complex organizations, bridging engineering, design, and business strategy to turn emerging technology into real institutional value. With 15+ years of hands-on experience as an engineer, designer, and technology leader, I bring a rare combination of technical depth and cross-functional fluency that allows me to align diverse stakeholders, accelerate delivery, and build AI products that actually get adopted.

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Interests

Enterprise AI Adoption

Solving the hard problem of making AI work inside large organizations, not just technically, but operationally and culturally. I'm drawn to the full challenge: aligning stakeholders across business units, navigating institutional complexity, and building AI products that integrate naturally into existing workflows rather than demanding that organizations change around them. My experience at JP Morgan Chase has given me a deep appreciation for what it actually takes to ship AI at enterprise scale.

Human-Centered AI

Bringing a designer's instincts to AI product development to ensure that powerful technology translates into genuinely useful human experiences. I believe the defining challenge of the current AI moment is not building capable models; it is building interfaces and workflows that make those capabilities accessible, trustworthy, and intuitive for everyday users. My background at the intersection of engineering and design gives me an uncommon lens on this problem.

Cross-Disciplinary Leadership

Leading at the intersection of engineering, design, product, and business strategy to deliver AI initiatives that are technically excellent and organizationally aligned. I've spent my career functioning as connective tissue between disciplines, translating between technical and non-technical stakeholders, building shared vision across teams, and creating the conditions for high-performing, cross-functional groups to do their best work.

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Core Technical Expertise

Legendary

• AI Product Development: LLM integration, AI-assisted workflows, enterprise AI applications
• AI-Assisted Development: GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor.ai
• Front-End Development: React, JavaScript (ES6+), HTML5/CSS3
• State Management: Redux, Zustand
• Design Systems: Storybook, Figma
• UI/UX Design & Implementation
• Front-End Architecture

Advanced

• Full-Stack Development: Node, Prisma, Dexie
• Performance Optimization & Analytics
• Cloud Services: AWS S3, CircleCI
• Testing Frameworks: Jest, Cypress
• Modern Build Tools: Webpack, Babel, Next

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Professional History

Vice President Sr Lead Software Engineer

JP Morgan Chase - March 2022 to Current

• Leading cross-functional working groups for two AI-powered applications: an intelligent news application that delivers highly actionable information based on news analysis, and a speech-to-text application featuring meeting transcription and summarization capabilities that streamline enterprise workflows.
• Led front-end React application development for the news application and full-stack development of the speech application, implementing modern AI integration patterns to create intuitive user experiences for complex AI functionality.
• Establishing and executing product roadmaps across product, design, and engineering teams while ensuring consistent delivery timelines and cross-departmental alignment for both high-impact AI initiatives.

Senior Front End Engineer, User Experience Designer and Visual Designer

Inky Technology Corporation - February 2021 to March 2022

• Led the consolidation of two front-end applications (React and vanilla JavaScript) into a single, unified experience that increased development efficiency and solved sales challenges with two applications.
• Designed and developed a brand new design system in Figma and Storybook and leveraged it in the new consolidated application mentioned above.
• Managed the deployment of an application analytics system built with Google Tag Manager, Snowplow and Indicative that increased visibility into product usage and performance.

Senior Front End Engineer

Updater - August 2020 to February 2021

• Worked with the front-end team to migrate from a single page application to a statically generated Next application leading to more efficient development and faster application load times.
• Collaborated with front-end engineers, product and design to develop a design system in Storybook that will form the backbone of all front-end development for years to come.

Front End Engineer

Updater - March 2018 to August 2020

• Led the front-end development of an event tracking and A/B testing framework that formed the technical backbone of Updater's A/B testing strategy.
• Analyzed and compared modern front-end view rendering libraries including HyperHTML, LitHTML, React, Preact, and Vue. Facilitated the adoption of React/Preact for view rendering which resulted in increased development speed and more reliable components.
• Spearheaded the development of clean architecture solutions relating to state management, routing, and view rendering resulting in a more robust, testable, and comprehensible codebase.
• Planned, developed and analyzed A/B experiments in a hyper-collaborative environment resulting in multi-million dollar revenue gains.

Senior Front End Engineer

Huge - July 2016 to March 2018

• Spearheaded the front-end development of Speak2Sign, a React/Redux kiosk application to help hearing people learn American Sign Language and connect with deaf people at a local market.
• Led the front-end development of templates and components for a large, multinational corporate website running on Adobe Experience Manager, transforming a dated website, and paving the way for future work.
• Collaborated with a WordPress back-end engineer to develop a medical information website that supports patients suffering from a rare cancer.
• Competed in a high-stakes United States Government hackathon with a team of 8 engineers, designers, and product managers, and claimed victory.
• Won three internal hackathons about community change, conversational interfaces, and augmented reality, one successfully launching as the product Speak2Sign at Union Market.
• Leveraged JavaScript skills to augment and develop new, in-house smart office technologies including large screen interfaces that report the weather, display ride sharing arrival times and welcome clients using facial recognition technology.

Senior Software Engineer & Designer

Patdek - October 2013 to September 2017

• Designed and developed a JavaScript web application featuring search, virtual scrolling, cloud storage, document sharing, and annotation.
• Created an identity and visual language for a legal startup focused on patent law.
• Contributed to early corporate development leveraging lightweight, low friction tools such as Google Apps, Slack, Trello, and GitHub.
• Collaborated with the founding team to craft a corporate mission statement and develop marketing language used in online ads and blog posts.

Front End Software Engineer

Kalibri Labs - August 2015 to July 2016

• Led the development of a single-page dashboard application written in React used to analyze revenue data in the hotel industry.
• Implemented a next-generation codebase utilizing bleeding-edge ECMAScript 6+ code compiled with Babel.
• Utilized Redux and Immutable to keep data flowing in one direction and allow for blazing fast component rendering.
• Implemented a test-driven workflow using Mocha, Chai, and Sinon to ensure maximum code quality and functionality.
• Optimized performance using Webpack and React Router ensuring only common and route-specific assets are retrieved on page load.
• Developed beautiful, responsive visualizations with D3 that dynamically resize as the browser window changes, opening the door to mobile visualizations in the future.
• Leveraged design skills to develop company-wide brand guidelines, resulting in a more unified experience across disciplines.
• Incorporated brand guidelines into a dashboard design that sells itself by evoking a sense of beauty and delight unseen by the target market.

Lead Designer & Front End Software Engineer

Inky Technology - August 2010 to August 2015

• Led the design and development of a new desktop email application that reduced the previous codebase from 100,000 to 20,000 lines of code.
• Collaborated with a team of software engineers to build the Inky Mail application for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows.
• Improved office workflow and product quality by implementing a continuous integration system that executes nightly builds, notifying the team of any code quality issues.
• Designed and maintained a WordPress marketing website that converted 30% of visitors to download.
• Created the Inky octopus character to symbolize an email application that is smart and versatile.
• Crafted 10 brief yet comprehensive marketing decks used to bring in new business and develop existing relationships.
• Fostered a culture of design in a company composed of software developers despite being the only designer on staff.

Bachelor of Fine Arts

University of Maryland - August 2007 to August 2011

• Built software in collaboration with a graduate student studying dance for a 2 night, 500 person, thesis performance composed of motion tracking, interactive code, and image projection.
• Developed a multidisciplinary approach to art and design that combined computer programming, printmaking, drawing, and painting.
• Exhibited 5 artworks at the Art Honors Thesis Exhibition.
• Received the Creative and Performing Arts Scholarship and the Nancy Clarvit Design Scholarship for work in art and design.
• Built websites and templates for Drupal, WordPress, and Omeka while interning at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.
• Completed basic biology curriculum before committing to art and design full-time.

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Personal Projects

The following personal projects demonstrate my commitment to continuous learning and experimentation with emerging technologies. These self-directed initiatives allow me to develop cutting-edge skills that I subsequently apply to enterprise challenges, providing organizations with forward-thinking technical leadership.

Synesthesia

2024 to Current

Project page: charlespinnix.com/projects/synesthesia

• Architected a real-time music visualization system where a shared RxJS pipeline transforms live MIDI into pitch, volume, tempo, chord, density, and color streams that visual components subscribe to independently across browser and server runtimes.
• Built a headless Node MIDI hub that captures native Core MIDI, runs the shared stream graph, and fans out pre-computed snapshots to any number of browser tabs over WebSocket, enabling synchronized multi-display performances without duplicating MIDI analysis in each client.
• Designed and built a library of 35+ modular visual components (Parts) that react to musical characteristics in real-time, each self-contained with its own subscription lifecycle, direct DOM manipulation for animation-critical paths, and strict memory management to avoid garbage collection pressure at frame rate.
• Engineered layered SVG reactive scenes where artwork exported from Affinity Designer drives GPU-accelerated vector and particle programs in real time, alongside a node-based scene editor (React Flow) for assembling, positioning, and layering Parts with MIDI recording and playback synchronized to the visualization.
• Maintained sustained 60 FPS through deliberate performance engineering: cached DOM references, batched reads and writes, O(1) Map-based lookups, reusable buffers for color conversion, and bypassing React rendering entirely for animation hot paths, validated with headless and Playwright benchmark suites.
• Collaborated with a pianist to produce unique poster-sized prints capturing musical performances as visual artifacts, combining Three.js 3D rendering, SVG vector output, and Anime animation across a stack that also includes Tone for audio synthesis and the Web MIDI API for hardware input.

Verious

2024 to Current

Project page: charlespinnix.com/projects/verious

• Developing a gallery-ready body of large-scale fine art works built on a layered visual system combining flat vector, isometric vector, and pixel techniques to explore themes of technology, mortality, and systems of belief.
• Architected Compositor, a WebGPU artwork pipeline that loads SVG + manifest packages, discovers typed layers from artwork exported in Affinity Designer, and renders gallery-scale compositions (15,000×19,800 px) through a tiled preview and full-resolution export path, absorbing the procedural rendering workflows previously built in Monitor.
• Built a program registry mapping each SVG layer to a render mode: raster (pixel-fill), vector (stamp placement, nanobots trail paths on hex grids), HTML (hex-grid and pixel-grid CSS overlays), and static image, with schema-driven layer inspectors and settings merged from manifest overrides.
• Engineered a three-stage export pipeline: WebGPU tile compositing in the browser for interactive preview, Playwright server-side baking of HTML grid layers to tile PNGs, and a Rust/wgpu renderer that parallelizes final tile compositing with rayon and stitches full-resolution archival PNGs.
• Designing a modular illustration system in Affinity Designer with a rigorous internal color vocabulary and reusable component library, enabling consistent visual language across works of varying scale and complexity.
• Producing archival fine art prints on an Epson P900 for proofing and small-scale output.

Topdeck

2024 to Current

Project page: charlespinnix.com/projects/topdeck

• Built a full-stack Magic: The Gathering collection manager using Next.js 16 (App Router) and SQLite, featuring a searchable and virtualised collection table, set completion tracking across the full MTG catalog, and a deck management system with group-based card organization.
• Engineered nightly and weekly ETL pipelines using Node Cron, stream-json, and stream-chain to stream and process a 2 GB Scryfall bulk card JSON file, refresh TCGPlayer pricing, load Commander Spellbook combos and keyword catalogs, and sync corpus data into the Builder subsystem.
• Built a Commander deck intelligence engine (Builder) with seven analysis phases (Mana Base, Ramp, Card Flow, Interaction, Payoffs, Synergy, and Tech), backed by an authored mechanical tagging ontology, Monte Carlo simulation, and a synergy ensemble combining tag fit, combo lookup, lexical similarity, and curator reasoning corpora.
• Exposed Builder as a CLI-first agent interface (structured JSON stdout) so AI coding tools can invoke deck analysis, measurement, and lookup tools without an MCP server, grounding recommendations in deterministic card facts rather than model inference alone.
• Built a 20+ widget analytics dashboard organized across five categories (overview, decks, lands, cleanup, and collections), surfacing collection value, foil breakdowns, duplicate printings, land consistency, and set completion rates using Recharts, Plotly.js, and React Sparklines.
• Implemented a centralized RxJS store using BehaviorSubjects for all shared application state, with a custom useStream hook that subscribes any observable to React component state, enabling reactive filter pipelines, deck browsing, and optimistic UI updates with API rollback.
• Engineered a 3D foil card effect using CSS perspective transforms and dynamic shine/glare layers that respond to mouse position, replicating the physical look of a foil card in the browser.

Kalendr

2024 to Current

• Built a local-first personal finance application using Next.js 16 and SQLite, covering zero-based budgeting, transaction import and categorization, net worth tracking across accounts, items, and debts, and savings goal management, with all persisted state stored in a single SQLite database configurable for iCloud sync.
• Implemented a transaction tagger with user-defined category rules and a budget reconciliation workflow that compares planned vs actual spending by category, deriving monthly budget actuals from tagged transactions via an RxJS provider graph.
• Engineered net worth analysis modules projecting financial independence and security, including investment vs retirement bucket separation, 25× annual expense targets, bridge-to-65 modeling, emergency fund coverage, and conservative growth projections over a multi-decade horizon.
• Designed human-centered financial copy with card-level summaries and educational modals explaining each metric's calculation, inclusions, and exclusions, written for a mainstream personal-finance audience rather than a technical one.
• Built automated SQLite backup with Node Cron (nightly schedule plus startup backup) and a data export workflow for offline analysis.

Monitor

2024 to Current

• Architected a personal automation platform exploring local event sourcing through a SQLite-backed append-only command queue running inside the Next.js Node process, with a supervisor handling stale-job recovery, filesystem watchers dispatching commands on file changes, cron-scheduled rename scans, and correlation-ID tracing from dispatch through structured Pino logs persisted to SQLite.
• Engineered filesystem manipulation workflows for timestamp-based file renaming (filesystem birthtime and EXIF capture date), with path-guard enforcement on allowed output roots, cron-triggered directory scans, and CLI utilities for batch operations such as Leica time-offset renames.
• Built operational tooling around the command log: a live log tail, job history grouped and filterable by correlation ID, a runtime status dashboard, and a moodboard browser with persisted layout state for image collection workspaces.
• Implemented each workflow as a self-contained feature slice with its own Zod schemas, worker, server helpers, and UI viewer, demonstrating how a single in-process queue can coordinate diverse background tasks without a separate worker service or message broker.
• Migrated procedural art rendering and compositing workflows (pixel fill, nanobots, isometric modules) to the Compositor project, refocusing Monitor on file-system automation and the command-queue architecture.

Photography

2013 to Current

• Maintaining an ongoing documentary photography practice focused on capturing daily life.
• Creating and self-publishing photography books designed for personal contemplation and artistic reflection.
• Demonstrating versatile technical expertise across multiple camera systems, including professional full-frame Sony, Fujifilm, and Leica cameras.

Horizons

February 2022 to July 2022

• Designed and developed a sophisticated generative art system inspired by NFT avatar technology, combining SVG illustration techniques with custom Node algorithms to produce unique, procedurally-generated digital artworks.
• Engineered custom Node scripts to orchestrate complex layer combinations, color relationships, and compositional rules, demonstrating advanced programming skills applied to creative outcomes.
• Curated a selective collection from thousands of procedurally-generated outputs, showcasing both technical prowess in creating the system and artistic discernment in final selection.