Michael Stone
Principal Software Architect & Hands-On Engineering Lead
I deliver complete production systems solo — the work that used to take a team.
Thirty years of taking software from a vague brief to production.
I design the framework, write the hard code, and ship it. Looking to relocate — on-site anywhere in the US, or remote.
Most teams don't need a department. They need one person who can actually build the thing.
You have a system rotting under technical debt, a legacy stack nobody wants to touch, or a product that needs to exist and no team to build it. The usual answer is to staff up: a few developers, a database specialist, testers, a business analyst, a project manager — and three months of coordination before anyone ships.
There's another way now. I architect the system and orchestrate AI coding agents to do the volume work. You get the judgment of a principal engineer and the throughput of a team, on one invoice — and none of the coordination overhead.
What you get
Architecture that holds.
The framework, data layer, and patterns everything else is built on — done right the first time, so the codebase gets cheaper to work in over time instead of more expensive.
The hard code, written.
Auth and OAuth migrations, custom data frameworks, reusable component libraries, CI/CD where there was none. The parts that decide whether a project succeeds or quietly dies.
The discipline that was missing.
Automated testing, repeatable deployment, code review that raises the team around me. I've stood up first-ever CI/CD pipelines at organizations where every release was a manual, white-knuckle event.
End to end, solo.
From "we have an idea" to "it's in production." Clean, testable code treated as a deliverable in its own right — not an afterthought.
Where I've done it
Regulated environments, where getting it wrong has consequences.
Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board — Principal Architect
2023–2026Architected the entire application framework for a state regulator's modernization program: API authorization layer, custom EF Core data framework, reusable Blazor component library. Adopted platform-wide; cut per-feature build time significantly. Migrated legacy authentication to OAuth, clearing the path to the cloud, and established the program's first CI/CD pipelines.
University of Washington — Principal Architect
2021–2023Sole architect and developer of an 11,000-line TypeScript application supporting the university's Workday migration — an n-tiered UI over a REST API with an edit/stage/approve pipeline handling tens of thousands of nodes.
Pima County Attorney's Office — Architect
2017–2021Rebuilt the evidence-packaging application used daily by legal staff, and introduced consistent patterns across a mixed legacy/modern codebase.
Lifetime Health Diary — Lead Architect / CTO
2014–2017Led a health-data startup from design to launch. Owned security: commissioned the external audits and redesigned the architecture in response.
Stack: C# / .NET Core · Blazor · Web API · EF Core · Identity Server · TypeScript / Angular · SQL Server · Azure · C / C++
I still write the hard code
An architect who never stopped being an engineer.
Everything above is what I do for clients. Below is what I do because I can't help myself — and it's the honest proof that the architecture advice comes from someone who still lives in the code.
Discovery Assistant — LLM document review
.NET 10 · Claude + OpenAI · pgvector
A production-shaped RAG system for legal eDiscovery: answers grounded only in the case corpus, every claim cited to its source passage, refusal when the documents don't support one. Model-agnostic LLM integration with per-call cost telemetry, verified against the real Enron corpus.
View details →Dungeon — grid dungeon crawler
C++23 · DirectX 12
A Dungeon Master / Legend of Grimrock-style first-person crawler with a custom DX12 renderer: metallic-roughness PBR, point-light cube shadows, volumetric dust and a data-driven in-game map editor.
View details →Stonethorpe — personal web platform
.NET 10 · ASP.NET Core · Blazor
Three apps on a single small VPS behind Caddy: this portfolio, a business site, and an Azure-DevOps-style project tracker (Blazor Server) that links GitHub branches and commits to work items.
View details →How to work with me
Fixed-scope builds
"Ship us this system." You describe the outcome; I deliver it.
Fractional principal engineer
Architecture and delivery for a team that's missing a senior anchor.
Full-time
If the problem is big enough to be worth all of me.
Currently in Flagstaff, Arizona — and looking to relocate. On-site anywhere in the US, hybrid, or remote. Authorized to work in the US; no visa sponsorship required.
Got a system that's drowning, or a product that needs to exist and no team to build it?
Start a conversationkandm0506@gmail.com · 520-270-0635