AHAndrew Houser.
Get in touch

Work & Experience

Two decades of
front-end.

Front-end engineering manager who still ships code. I lead the 10-person Customer Experience team at Milliman IntelliScript, act as the company's front-end architect, and own Sable, the React and TypeScript design system behind 7 product applications. I'm self-taught, and I've spent more than two decades building interfaces for data-heavy products, from pharmaceutical intelligence to disaster response to insurance underwriting.


Apr 2025 – Present

Team Lead, Customer Experience (CX)

Oct 2024 – Apr 2025

Staff Software Engineer

Milliman IntelliScript, Remote

SaaS products for life insurance underwriting and risk assessment, used by underwriters, clinicians, and insurance professionals.

Leadership

  • Lead a 10-person team organized as two product teams, reporting to the Director of Engineering. Roughly doubled sprint throughput on one team over the past year as shared tooling matured and team practices tightened.
  • Set team norms for daily coordination, developer-to-developer communication, and code review depth that raised the quality bar for everything the team ships.
  • Shape front-end hiring across engineering: interview design, front-end contract, and full-stack candidates for multiple teams, and redesigned the front-end interview process to bring in senior engineers with strong front-end skills.
  • Handle the full range of people management, including career coaching, supporting a team member's move to a team that better fit her goals, and managing a performance improvement plan through to a final decision.
  • Founded and run a biweekly front-end Community of Practice (about 14 regular attendees) that reviews Sable and blueprint changes, gathers needs from product teams, and covers topics like AI tooling, observability, and design review.
  • Run workshops for the CX team and the wider engineering org on AI tooling and how to use it well at low cost.

Architecture and engineering

  • Grew Sable, the company's published React 19 and TypeScript design system, from about 25 to about 60 components used by 7 product applications. Took it from no automated testing, linting, or accessibility tooling to 100% unit test and Storybook coverage.
  • Serve as front-end architect in an organization without a dedicated role. Wrote about 10 architecture decision records (ADRs), ratified with the system architect, and built them into Next.js, React SPA, and micro-frontend blueprints that set up Vite, MSW, TanStack Query, Zustand, and Datadog RUM. One new team credited the Next.js blueprint and Sable with saving weeks on its way to market.
  • Migrated 3 applications from Webpack to Vite, cutting local dev server startup from about a minute to under 5 seconds.
  • Built Sable's DataTable, a single component that handles custom sorting, custom cell rendering, nested sub-rows, and embedded data visualizations. Used in 4 applications, with 3 more migrating to it from AG Grid.
  • Restructured the global layout and CSS of live production applications to support persistent navigation with independently scrolling content, using visual regression testing and UAT to avoid breaking anything. Shipped in 2 applications so far.
  • Built the CX team's AI development toolkit: a spec-driven development workflow (5 agents), a pull request review workflow (8 agents, including a dedicated accessibility reviewer), and a QA skill that runs build, lint, and tests before review. Shared with the wider engineering org.

Speaking

  • “User-Centered Design in Practice”, Milliman Technology Forum, Huntington Beach, CA
ReactTypeScriptNext.jsViteStorybookVitestMSWTanStack QueryZustandReact AriaDatadog RUMAWSSAFe Agile

Jun 2022 – Aug 2024

Senior Software Engineer

TitanHST, Remote, Newport Beach, CA

IoT devices that alert for disasters and help direct first responders to the right areas.

  • Led front-end development of the web admin platform administrators use to manage the alerting devices and monitor their status.
  • Brought the platform to WCAG 2.1 AA compliance to support adoption by government customers.
  • Simplified key admin workflows, reducing support requests by about 20% according to quarterly support reports.
ReactTypeScriptReduxBlueprintJSStyled ComponentsJestStorybookAWS

Jan 2020 – Jun 2022

Staff UI Software Engineer

Skillshare, Remote, New York, NY

Online learning platform for creative professionals.

  • Led the migration of the legacy Backbone.js front end to React and Next.js.
  • Established front-end best practices and mentored engineers.
ReactNext.js 10ApolloGraphQLMaterial UIBootstrapCypressJestStorybook

Jul 2014 – Dec 2019

Senior Software Engineer

QLess, Remote, Pasadena, CA

Queue management and customer engagement SaaS.

  • Spotted a new product opportunity through customer conversations and gaps in the product portfolio. Pitched it to the CEO, built and piloted a calendaring application with a select group of customers, and turned it into a product that sales used to upsell existing customers and win new ones.
  • Took over leadership of product development after several engineering leadership departures.
  • Migrated the legacy OpenLaszlo front end to Knockout.js.
JavaScriptKnockout.jsOpenLaszloREST APIs

Jul 2002 – Jun 2014

Senior Product Designer / Engineer

Newport Strategies, acquired by Thomson Reuters, Portland, ME; London, UK; Philadelphia, PA

  • Designed and built the UI for a line of generic pharmaceutical competitive intelligence applications. After Thomson Reuters acquired Newport Strategies, relocated to London to integrate them into the Thomson Reuters platform.
ASP.NETJavaScriptXML

Side projects

On my own time

Things I build on my own time, mostly to learn.

My Recipe Vault

A recipe app for iOS that keeps your recipes on your device and in your own iCloud account, not on anyone's server.

DJ Houser Live

An iOS app for listening to live DJ sets and archived shows, with no account required.

selfHealingAI

An agentic AI system that reduces friction in the development process by adding agentic loop observers that detect changes that currently require lengthy cross-team negotiation and instead invoke AI to change code autonomously. Demonstrates self-healing patterns and reflection loops in real development workflows.

TypeScriptAI AgentsAgentic LoopsSelf-HealingReflection
  • Agentic loop observers monitor development changes and autonomously update code.
  • AI-driven code changes are invoked automatically to resolve issues without human intervention.
  • Reflection loops evaluate the quality of fixes and iterate until the system stabilizes.
  • Demonstrates the copilot-to-autopilot progression in a concrete, working system.
day-trader-ml

The evolved version of day-trader, same paper-trading agent, but I started replacing LLM decisions with trained ML models wherever pattern recognition beats language reasoning. The interesting part is figuring out where that line actually is.

PythonLightGBMFinBERTHMMFastAPINext.jsDocker
  • Trade decisions and position sizing handled by LightGBM, trained on 50+ features from real trade outcomes rather than prompted reasoning.
  • Swapped LLM sentiment scoring for FinBERT, faster, more consistent, and doesn’t hallucinate market opinions.
  • Hidden Markov Model for regime detection, running in shadow mode so I can compare before committing.
  • ML models don’t go live until 28 days of paired predictions look good, with a kill-switch if anything goes sideways.
day-trader

A paper-trading agent that runs 24/7, follows markets across time zones, and makes its own buy/sell decisions using an LLM. Starts with $1,000 of fake money and tries to grow it. This is where the whole thing started.

PythonOllamaFastAPIAPSchedulerNext.jsDocker
  • 19 scheduled jobs that follow the sun, Nikkei open, FTSE handoff, US session, and everything in between.
  • The LLM handles research, sentiment, trade hypotheses, and even argues the bear case against its own positions.
  • Weekly routines for rebalancing, performance review, and compacting its own memory so it doesn’t lose context.
  • Full Next.js dashboard with 16 pages, proxying a FastAPI backend, all running in Docker.

Résumé

Download a PDF of my résumé, or view it on the web.