Principal AI Engineer
Aric Camarata
Principal AI Engineer with 20+ years building distributed systems, AI infrastructure, and full-stack applications across defense, enterprise, and product companies. I work on multi-model AI routing, hybrid retrieval (RAG), federated GraphQL, and high-throughput Go backends, and I built nSelf, a self-hosted PaaS, and nClaw, a multi-model AI router. I led development at Northrop Grumman under a TS clearance, now expired. Remote only.
Earlier work spans Apple, AT&T, the U.S. Treasury (GSOC), Credit Karma, Walmart Labs, and Cigna, across consumer platforms, government security operations, and enterprise health tech. I build AI that keeps data private: local inference on Apple Silicon, classifier-driven model routing, and on-premise RAG pipelines that keep sensitive data off third-party clouds. The open-source nSelf CLI stands up a full Postgres, Hasura, and auth stack on a $4 a month Hetzner server, with the capabilities you would otherwise pay a managed host for.
Work Experience
1420+ years of enterprise and startup development. Contract and full-time work spanning web platforms, backend systems, and open-source tooling.
My Projects
1010 open-source packages and platforms published on npm and GitHub.
Blog
View all (10) →Cascade Today: An All-in-One Layer for Claude Code
A month in, Cascade is a real product. What I learned about multi-model routing, hybrid retrieval (RAG, RRF, reranking), and improving a coding harness instead of replacing it.
ReadCurtain: Closing macOS Screen Sharing's One Privacy Gap in an Afternoon
macOS Screen Sharing is excellent, but it leaves one real privacy gap. The fix is simple, yet it usually hides behind pricey paid tools, so I built an open-source version in an afternoon.
ReadStarting Cascade: Early Lessons Extending Claude Code
Why I started building Cascade, and the first hard problems that showed up when you try to wrap a coding agent with your own tooling.
ReadLet’s talk
Open to principal, staff, and senior IC roles in AI infrastructure and developer tooling. Remote only.
