Senior / Staff / Principal Software Engineer
Platform & backend architecture · Native mobile · Application security · Governed AI

micrantha.com · ryanjennin.gs · email

I build long-lived software systems where correctness, security, operability, and explicit trust boundaries matter.

My commercial experience spans 15+ years of Android, iOS, React Native, backend integrations, platform delivery, modernization, and security-sensitive engineering. My independent/open-source work extends that foundation into Kotlin Multiplatform, Rust/Go developer tools, local-first AI infrastructure, and governed agentic systems. The common thread is maintainable architecture, explicit trust boundaries, and independently verifiable outcomes.

The recurring question behind much of my current work is:

How do autonomous systems become more capable without quietly accumulating unchecked authority?

• Governed agentic systems — policy, capabilities, approvals, evidence, provenance, replay, and bounded side effects.
• AI-native SDLC — treating agents as constrained delivery participants rather than trusted autocomplete or autonomous maintainers.
• Context integrity — deterministic prompt/context composition, manifests, lockfiles, provenance, and reproducible agent inputs.
• Agent identity & authorization — sender-constrained OAuth, proof-of-possession, replay resistance, and MCP security boundaries.
• Local-first AI infrastructure — model routing, supervisor/specialist agents, memory, evaluation, scheduling, and secure execution on self-hosted infrastructure.
• Platform & developer experience — paved paths, strong contracts, predictable failure modes, observability, CI/CD, and incremental modernization.

A principle I keep returning to: a system may propose its successor, but it should not independently authorize the transition to that successor. Durable state changes need an external trust boundary and evidence that can be independently evaluated.

These are professional engagements, separate from the independent projects below. The summaries are drawn from my career records and experience; proprietary source code and employer deployment data are not presented as public verification.

• Manulife / John Hancock — regulated mobile systems: Contributed to Android, iOS and React Native modernization, including authentication-flow improvements, client-state and concurrency fixes, dependency upgrades, and pentest remediation coordinated with AppSec. The emphasis was on incremental reliability and secure delivery rather than a wholesale rewrite.
• QuickMobile / Cvent — live event systems: Built and supported mobile/backend event-engagement features including live polling, beacon integrations, analytics and attendee workflows, including large conference deployments. Improvements to client-specific data/query behavior informed shared application code.
• ePACT — backend/mobile integration and automation: Built change-oriented synchronization and configurable mobile workflows spanning backend services and local data; strengthened Selenium/Appium test automation and mentored a junior QA colleague.

These are scope-of-work statements, not audited claims of individual adoption, quantified savings or sole ownership. More role-specific project designs, failure modes and reproducible public artifacts follow below.

My commercial work covers long-lived mobile/client applications, backend integrations, modernization, release engineering, and security-sensitive delivery. The projects below are independent/open-source engineering, except for explicitly identified collaborative work such as OpenArchive. They demonstrate design and implementation decisions, not unverified employer-scale adoption.

Read engineering case studies with problem, design, verification, and limitations →

Additional work: Hyperion Community (infrastructure/GitOps), Keylix Community (OAuth/DPoP sender binding), Seamwork (modern C++23 interface studies), Shopping Inventory (private data, public implementation and deterministic evidence), and git-autocommit (bounded AI-assisted Git commits).

• Secure Agent Workflows — secure AI-assisted delivery patterns, task boundaries, threat modeling, and review evidence.
• Micrantha engineering contracts — shared secure-SDLC, testing, CI/CD, repository and release standards, with no blanket certification implied.
• Personal technical work — music tooling, guitar/DSP experiments and local-first projects.

Historical repositories remain available for context; archived examples do not imply current support or current engineering style.

A set of deliberately separated projects exploring those boundaries:

flowchart LR
    C["Calathea<br/>—<br/>workflow"] --> I["Invokrum<br/>—<br/>context identity"]
    I --> D["Dubnium<br/>—<br/>bounded execution"]
    D --> K["Keylix<br/>—<br/>sender binding"]
    K --> A["Anthesis<br/>—<br/>policy · approval · evidence"]
    A --> E["Governed effects"]

The goal is not a monolithic agent framework. The interesting work is at the boundaries: what context entered the system, who or what is acting, what authority it has, what effect is requested, who approves it, and what evidence remains afterward.

I tend to work best on systems that are already real enough to have constraints:

• production software with users, migrations, compatibility requirements, and operational history;
• security-sensitive authentication, authorization, credential, and trust boundaries;
• platform or developer-experience work that must improve delivery without creating a second platform nobody wants to maintain;
• mobile systems where platform-specific behavior matters and cannot always be abstracted into "just another web client";
• agentic/AI systems where probabilistic reasoning needs deterministic controls around consequential effects.

I prefer incremental modernization over rewrites, explicit contracts over convention, boring cryptography over clever cryptography, and evidence over claims that a system "should" be safe.

I am continuing to turn the Micrantha work into small, composable, auditable systems and public reference material for secure agentic software delivery.

Professionally, I am interested in Staff / Principal engineering and selective contract work around AI infrastructure, platform engineering, application security, developer experience, secure SDLC, and complex mobile/backend systems — preferably remote-first in Canada.

I am also interested in collaborating on work around:

• agent governance, authorization, observability, and evaluation;
• MCP and agent/tool security;
• secure platform and API design;
• mobile security and device/app trust;
• local/self-hosted AI infrastructure;
• practical research-to-production engineering.

I play guitar and piano, record music, play hockey, and occasionally turn engineering energy toward things that have nothing to do with infrastructure — including Entanglement of Ages, a long-form fiction/screenplay project.

_{he / him}