def close_the_loop(task):
plan = planner(task)
for step in plan:
result = worker(step, tools=bounded)
if not verifier(result, evidence=True):
return recover(step)
return ledger.write(result)
I ship inside a bank. My agents ship while I sleep.
Regulated credit-risk data by day. Twelve agent environments running real jobs by night. Three companies founded.
- records a day ≈26M
through production data pipelines at USAA
- tokens processed ¼ trillion+
input plus output, across every model family since GPT-3
i - campaign leads 40,000
at about $0.29 per lead for Fit & Flourish
- funding and prizes $100K+
for ReCap Budget, $46K cash plus about $60K in-kind
Three jobs, one skill.
Deciding what the model gets to touch, and proving it afterward.
Nineteen years of credit-risk data, corrected in place.
Since 2023 on a USAA credit-risk data team. Legacy pipeline retired with zero downtime. FICO 10T asset delivered for CECL on the regulatory deadline. Dozens of SKILL.md guides for the team, and a seat in the guild that decides how the bank uses generative AI.
A thousand scheduled runs overnight, each with a receipt.
Joy is my agent: Hermes runs the loop, GBrain remembers on pgvector, a self-hosted Plane board holds the work we hand each other, and a verifier refuses to say "done" without evidence. Six more people and six clients run their own Hermes agents on infrastructure I built.
Seven developers, forty thousand leads, one company still running.
ReCap Budget raised over $100K and shipped a fine-tuned receipt classifier before function calling existed. Fit & Flourish's creative loop produced 40,000 leads at 29 cents each. Guadalupe Automation is where I build large systems nearly single-handedly with an AI development pipeline I've spent years honing.
The systems.

Joy
Build the loop, then make it survive the night.

Cyrus-v2
Agents are cheap. Budgets, schedules, and evidence are the platform.

Regulated credit-risk delivery
Make change without losing control.

Store-close reconciliation
Put fuzzy work in a box with sharp edges.

SecondHome
A score without a reason is just a guess with confidence.

Fit & Flourish
Let the machine test creatives. Let a person decide what ships.

ReCap Budget
Read the receipt better than anyone, then give advice you can defend.

ReCap receipt classifier
Curate the dataset. The model is the easy part.
Where I've worked.
June 2024 – present Data Engineer III · USAA
I deliver and support regulated credit-risk data systems on Snowflake, dbt, Python, SQL, GitLab CI/CD, Control-M scheduling, and a validation framework that has to satisfy auditors as well as engineers.
- Delivered three major consumer-lending features in the second half of 2025, including a legacy pipeline retirement and a FICO 10T data asset for CECL, both on the regulatory deadline.
- Corrected and backfilled nineteen years of historical data (2006 to 2025) with targeted comparisons instead of full rebuilds, and kept reporting uninterrupted through the transitions.
- Contribute to the bank's Data Science and Engineering Guild, where decisions and education about how generative AI is implemented across the company get made.
- Built a reusable validation query that collapsed a multi-layer transformation into one check the whole team and its validators now use.
- Mentored teammates, onboarded new engineers, taught agentic development practices, and wrote dozens of SKILL.md guides for the repetitive processes in my area.
- Delivered modernization work across a reusable authorization view, a certified-source migration, and a 300,000-row seed file promoted into a governed Snowflake external table.
- Where
- San Antonio, Texas
- When
- June 2024 – present
January 2026 – present Founder and CEO · Guadalupe Automation
I design and build agentic systems for operations-heavy businesses, from discovery and architecture through deployment. The codebases are large and I develop them nearly single-handedly, with an AI development pipeline I've spent years honing: specs, coding agents, verification gates, and evidence on every delivery.
- Architected a store-close reconciliation platform for a multi-store retailer where Python owns reconciliation and ledgers, models own document extraction and summaries, and people review the exceptions.
- Designed SecondHome, a source-to-score qualification system for distressed-property leads with provenance, confidence, and a written call rationale on every record.
- Run isolated client agent deployments on per-client VPS infrastructure with preconfigured container stacks, separate from the shared-host environments I run for private users.
- Build with a fixed pipeline: outcome and acceptance test first, split deterministic work from model judgment, smallest useful build, agents implement bounded changes, deterministic validation, human review where consequences are real, live readback after deploy, evidence attached to the task.
- Lead one employee and partner with a co-founder who runs sales; I own the technical delivery end to end.
- Where
- San Antonio, Texas
- When
- January 2026 – present
2024 – 2025 Co-founder, marketing and automation lead · Fit & Flourish
I built the autonomous creative-testing loop and the marketing analytics behind a product launch, and led the team of six that kept it fed.
- Built an end-to-end automated Meta Ads pipeline that generated creative variants, monitored performance, killed poor performers, and iterated daily with a human review step in Discord.
- The launch waitlist campaign produced 40,000 leads and brought cost per lead from about $2.19 down to about $0.29.
- Led a team of six and owned the e-commerce, referral, tracking, and survey automation stack.
- Where
- San Antonio, Texas
- When
- 2024 – 2025
December 2021 – September 2023 CEO and Machine Learning Engineer · ReCap Budget
A student venture that turned into a real one. Personal-finance software that read your receipts better than anyone else on the market. Serverless on AWS before that was the obvious choice.
- Raised $46,000 in cash and about $60,000 in in-kind prizes, largely through the Stumberg Venture Competition, and led a team of seven developers with hiring and firing authority.
- Built the receipt pipeline: S3 to Lambda to Textract, behind a CNN gate. Fine-tuned a GPT-3 classifier on 40,000 curated items, covering 100+ categories at over 85% reported accuracy.
- Shipped structured JSON output from language models before function calling existed, and did bias-mitigation work on the fine-tuned advice-generation model.
- Where
- San Antonio, Texas
- When
- December 2021 – September 2023
June 2023 – August 2023 Data Engineering Intern · USAA
I took a credit-card underwriting data feature from requirements to production in one summer. Then I talked a bank into letting an intern demo a local RAG chatbot.
- Parsed semi-structured Kafka JSON into usable Snowflake views, wrote the Python validation scripts, and cleared the production control gate inside the internship window despite two requirement changes.
- Built a local, references-first benefits assistant on ChromaDB and Falcon-40B, no internet access. Presented it to hundreds of employees, then helped five colleagues deploy it.
- Where
- San Antonio, Texas
- When
- June 2023 – August 2023
2020 – 2024B.S. in Computer Science · Trinity University
San Antonio, Texas. Graduated 2024.
What my manager wrote.
“You had a really strong year, happy to have you on the team. You bring something we didn't have before.”
USAA manager, 2026
“Joey hit the ground running and never slowed down a bit.”
USAA manager, 2023
“He mentored teammates, shared AI-assisted development practices, created reusable documentation and troubleshooting guides, and partnered effectively with engineering, QA, DBA, and business stakeholders.”
USAA manager, 2026
05
The rest of the shelf.
06
Bring the ugly process. I'll make it a repeatable workflow.
I'll find the decisions, automate what deserves it, and leave enough evidence that the next engineer can trust it.
me@joeyhersh.com(713) 505-3289github.com/joey12725B.S. in Computer Science, Trinity University, 2024



