LIAM T. SARGENT

Engineering leader who still ships code. Platform, data and applied AI by day; realtime audio by night.

I lead software engineering at Federated Auto Parts, where a small, focused team builds the platform behind a member-owned auto parts network: the order gateway, the Kubernetes platform, the data lake, and the AI products on top of it.

Outside work I run Zip Technologies, my studio for audio and infrastructure R&D. Its main project is CloudLoop, a collaborative live looper with its own C++ audio engine.

Before that I built security and cloud tooling at Cloudera and infrastructure at startups. B.S. Computer Science, James Madison University. Based in Virginia.

Reach me at liam@ziptech.io · github.com/themailman05

Resume

WORK

Since 2023 I've turned a consultant-run IT shop into an in-house engineering team and a platform the company owns end to end.

Platform modernization

Moved the whole product portfolio off hand-managed EC2 and AWS CodeBuild onto Kubernetes (EKS), built by GitHub Actions on self-hosted runners and defined in Terraform.

  • The hard part was Windows: legacy .NET Framework apps, a point-of-sale system and vendor gateways now run as Windows containers on Kubernetes Windows nodes, with supervised boot scripts that let the scheduler restart them safely.
  • Release time for the legacy catalog fell 71%, from 28 to 8 minutes.
  • Production runs on a private-endpoint cluster reached through a self-healing bastion tunnel, with AWS primary and GCP failover.
  • Observability and on-call from scratch: Grafana metrics and logs, alerting, PagerDuty.

EKS · GKE · Terraform · GitHub Actions (ARC) · Kustomize · Skaffold · crane · Vault · Grafana · PagerDuty

Order gateway

The API that connects member stores, shops and partner systems. It translates six-plus ordering protocols into one and carries millions of orders a year at 99.99% uptime.

  • Doubles as an OpenID Connect identity provider, so a signed-in user can federate straight into AWS with short-lived, tenant-scoped credentials.
  • Vendor integrations are decoupled through Redis streams, so a slow partner can't stall the request path.

Python · MySQL · MongoDB · Redis · OIDC/JWT

Data lake

Built from zero: Apache Iceberg on S3, queried through Athena, orchestrated by Airflow, fed by batch and Redpanda streams in a bronze/silver/gold layout.

  • Demand forecasting with LightGBM quantile models, plus margin, interchange and lost-sales models for purchasing decisions.
  • Things I learned the hard way: Lake Formation grants bind to the table resource, so DROP + CREATE silently strips them (rebuild with DELETE + INSERT instead); Athena caps an Iceberg INSERT at 100 open partition writers, so big backfills get chunked.

Iceberg · Athena · Glue · Lake Formation · Airflow · Redpanda · Superset · PostgreSQL

Applied AI: Insight

An analytics agent, launched in 2026, that answers business owners' purchasing questions in plain English by writing and running SQL against the data lake.

  • Tenant isolation is enforced by the data plane, not the prompt: each user's token is exchanged for an AWS role whose Lake Formation row filters only expose that tenant's rows.
  • Automated conformance tests prove the denials, and every agent run is traced for evaluation.

LLM tool use · AWS STS web identity · Lake Formation · Dart · Flutter

CLOUDLOOP

A collaborative live looper and sample marketplace. Record a loop, a friend overdubs it from across the world, and the session stays in sync on every device. Now in private beta. I've been building it since 2020; an early version won an honorable mention at the Sia Skynet hackathon.

cloudloop.io

A CloudLoop session on iPhone: eight loops with waveforms and detected chords, above the record button, tuner and loop-length controls
A live session: every loop shows its waveform and chords.
The CloudLoop home screen on iPhone, listing sessions with tabs for Feed, Friends and Live
Sessions, feed, friends and live rooms.

The app

One Flutter codebase for iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux, with a VST3 plugin on the way.

  • Loop and playlist modes, overdubs and takes.
  • Fork anyone's loop or session into your own; the lineage comes with it.
  • Chord, key and tempo detection, a tuner and a metronome.

Flutter · Dart · C++ · Swift

Native audio

One low-latency C++ audio engine, one codebase, five platforms: iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux. Neural DSP runs in the same realtime pipeline on every device. Few audio apps ship anything like it.

  • Lock-free by design: the audio thread never waits on a lock or allocates memory.
  • Every event is timed against one sample clock, so overdubs and punch-ins land exactly on the loop.
  • Ableton Link keeps tempo and phase in sync with other apps and devices on the network.

C++ · Dart FFI · Core Audio · AAudio · WASAPI · LiteRT · Ableton Link

Looping without headphones

When loops play through the speaker, the mic hears them again on the next overdub. CloudLoop cancels that echo on the device, so you can jam with the phone on a table.

  • Echo cancellation built for music rather than speech, running in realtime.
  • Small on-device models take it further, trained on Colab, Apple Metal and rented GPUs.

DSP · TensorFlow · LiteRT · Python

Creators get paid

CloudLoop doubles as a marketplace for loops and sample packs.

  • Author and publish sample packs, and set a license on every loop.
  • Buyers pay the creator directly, with no platform in the middle of the payout.
  • Audio fingerprinting traces re-uploads back to the original, even when they're pitch- or time-shifted.

PayPal · Chromaprint · Panako

The realtime backend

A universal audio collaboration server: sessions, loops and presence stay in sync across every client over Socket.IO, backed by about 100 REST endpoints.

  • Postgres is the source of truth with RedisJSON as a fast edge cache.
  • Ableton Live set import and export.

Python · Flask · Socket.IO · PostgreSQL · Redis · Vue 3 · Web Audio

How it gets built

Small team, lots of automation.

  • GitOps on DigitalOcean Kubernetes: every pull request gets its own live review environment, and an end-to-end payment test runs after each deploy.
  • A "software factory" that hands tickets to cost-capped AI coding agents and scores every resulting pull request with automated evals.

DOKS · Kustomize · GitHub Actions · Playwright · Braintrust

LAB

Smaller experiments, open-source work and tools.

shoestring

One command rents the cheapest suitable GPU on the Akash marketplace, loads a model and serves it behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, optionally reachable only over your Tailscale network. Measured: a 27B coding model for about $0.16 an hour, serving in about 6 minutes.

Python · Akash · vLLM/llama.cpp · Tailscale

L'Automatique

A harness that runs Claude Code in a retry loop against external checks until everything passes or a safety limit trips. Specs go in, working software comes out, with Braintrust tracing every attempt.

Python · Claude Code · Braintrust

ArpExcel

A VST3/AU MIDI arpeggiator where patterns are spreadsheet formulas: cell references, arithmetic and functions like MOD, IF and RANDOM drive each step.

C++ · JUCE

Akash market monitor

Kubernetes cronjobs that poll a decentralized GPU marketplace and place real canary deployments, to measure actual success rates and cost instead of trusting providers' self-reported uptime.

Python · Kubernetes CronJobs

Earlier

DCI Scores Bot

Reddit bot that posts Drum Corps International competition results. Python, PRAW, BeautifulSoup.

TakeRoot

Android app for sharing and finding homegrown produce in your community. BluestoneHacks 2015.

JMUSE Player

Browser audio player with FFT visualization for WAV, MP3, MP4, FLAC and OGG via the Web Audio API.

Syncspin

Collaborative party playlist with voting and recommendations. Best use of Intel Mashery API, HackGT 2014.

MUSIC

I make electronic music, which is why I keep building audio tools.

Album "Data Man, Sir" on Spotify.

Live sets on Twitch.