CTO · AI Evangelist · Full-Stack — Fishers, IN
Brent Rager
Technology leader and AI thought leader with 20+ years building and leading effective global teams — founder & CEO/CTO of Smoo AI. I build cutting-edge AI integrations and advance AI-augmented coding, developer experience, and customer experience — putting AI into the products people actually use.
20+ yrsleading teamsRust · TSsystems & full-stackAIpatent author$200M+revenue ledAWSserverless · K8s
Founder & CEO/CTO · Smoo AI
CTO, Technology Leader, Business Leader, AI Evangelist, UX Designer, Full Stack Developer and more with 20+ years of experience and a passion for building and leading effective global teams.
AI
AI Thought Leader & Patent Author
Claude Code wrangler · building cutting-edge AI integrations
DX · CX
Developer & Customer Experience
People are everything
Dev
Rust, TypeScript, AWS
Global teams building microservices · serverless & Kubernetes
Data
Data Engineer and Analyst
PySpark, Looker, BigQuery, and more
Auto
Process Automation
Business scaler through automation
PM
Project and Product Management
Agile, Jira, Confluence, Github
Current Ventures
Leading the Commerce engineering team at Topstep. Previously a Staff Software Engineer on TopstepX / ProjectX, the trading platform (Dec 2025 – Nov 2026).
Learn about TopstepAI-forward platform building cutting-edge AI integrations — custom AI agents, AI-augmented developer tooling, CRMs, and automations. Thought leadership in AI-augmented coding and developer & customer experience.
Click here to Work With MeProfessional Experience
Achievements
- Leading the Commerce engineering team at Topstep.
Achievements
- Developing and maintaining TopstepX / ProjectX, the trading interface for Topstep.
- Developing C# .NET Core backend and React-based frontend.
- Improving DevOps and observability of existing systems along with delivering expertise in scaling and growth.
- Implementing and helping to manage and track SLOs to improve reliability and performance.
Achievements
- Founded consultancy providing fractional CTO services (avg 20 hrs/wk) alongside full-time roles; non-conflicting engagements.
- Delivering custom websites, CRM implementation, enterprise platform tools (observability, DevOps AI, config management), and comprehensive AI agent solutions.
- Developing open source software in observability, resiliency, and developer experience.
Achievements
- Shipped one-click voice+text AI agents in 4 months; <300ms median retrieval latency with RAG + pgvector; SOC2-aligned controls from day 1.
- Architected multi-tenant AWS SST backend with Node.js/Python microservices, Supabase/PostgreSQL, and strongly-typed Socket.IO RPC system.
- Designed React 19/Next.js 15 frontends with ShadCN + Tailwind 4; built admin dashboard and email/PDF templating service.
- Created comprehensive go-to-market materials using Adobe stack: marketing website, email templates, sales collateral, and promotional videos.
- Built monorepo with multi-language tooling and comprehensive DevOps/SRE strategy.
Achievements
- 0→$1M+ first-year revenue; improved site→purchase conversion +30% with UX revamp; reduced AWS cost per filing 34% via serverless/SST.
- Built partner ecosystem with white-labeled experiences for hundreds of partners; architected AWS serverless stack with SST + TypeScript.
- Engineered data pipeline (Python, Pandas, BigQuery, Looker Studio) with business dashboards, revenue notifications, and marketing analytics.
- Developed comprehensive tech stack: Next.js app, WordPress sites, React email/PDF templating, and admin dashboard.
- Headed company-wide SOC 2 compliance initiative achieving certification; implemented DevOps reliability with IaC, automated rollbacks, and disaster recovery.
- Scaled and mentored 8-person team; introduced Agile cadences and release processes.
Achievements
- Launched MVP with real-time IRS data feeds; directed initial release to first revenue customers.
- Hired and led 3-developer team; drove product management and roadmap for early company activities.
- Led consulting team in Next.js/AWS SST/Supabase architecture; implemented monitoring and incident response improvements.
- Participated in leadership strategy and partnership discussions to expand market reach.
Achievements
- Scaled operations from $10M → $200M+ supporting growth from 5 to 125 employees via automation and data-driven processes.
- Acted as interim COO during high growth period; led leadership meetings and spoke at company conferences as second main speaker.
- Built Salesforce → Monday.com integration reducing manual work 40%; automated contract templating, eSign, and document delivery.
- Managed comprehensive tech stack: Microsoft 365, employee identity, HR/payroll integrations, sales/marketing technology, and email operations.
- Established infrastructure automation and SRE standards supporting 20× growth; implemented Agile processes across 100+ person company.
Achievements
- Led 15-engineer org (2 EMs) delivering multi-region messaging platform (12 regions; 5M+ msgs/mo); achieved 99.95% SLO and <30min MTTR.
- Converted team of 5 C++ Windows developers to successful AWS globally distributed DevOps cloud service delivery team.
- Architected microservices on AWS (EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS); modernized PureConnect with Kubernetes eliminating major performance issues.
- Served as dev liaison for Genesys Cloud FedRAMP initiative achieving authorization; participated in product management, release management, and acquisition strategy.
- Received patent for smart response management system; saved major accounts with scale debugging and systems expertise.
- Travelled to customer conferences leading technology innovation discussions.
Achievements
- Worked on automotive electronic controller chip virtualization product in C++, Perl, Python.
- Implemented Python interface to virtualization engine delivering 60% improvement in development speed for chip and controller testing scripts.
Charitable Work
Community Impact
- Assisted in planning and execution of first annual event.
- Participated in strategic planning and execution.
- Volunteered at events and helped with fundraising.
Community Impact
- Lead the development of a new website and online presence.
- Participated in strategic planning and execution.
- Improved payment processing and donation tracking.
- Volunteered at events and helped with fundraising.
Education
Academic Focus
- Co-op at GE Appliances in Louisville, KY.
- Learned deep technical skills in hardware (FPGA, ASIC, PCB), software (C, C++, Java, Python, Assembly), and systems (Linux).
Technical Skills
Frontend
Project Management
Media and UI/UX
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