Mackenzie Bowes
British Columbia, Canada
Summary
- Technical founder and system architect with proven ability to identify core problems and ship solutions.
- Expertise spans full-stack development, AI engineering, UX systems, and cross-functional execution.
- Thrives in environments with concrete problems to solve, from startup chaos to technical debt elimination.
Skills & Results
- Frontend Engineering: 96/100 GitHired Score — Demonstrated through shipped AI products and independent work
- UX/UI Mastery: Ranked #28 in Canada / Top 0.5% globally on Uxcel, a design education platform used by multiple Fortune 500 orgs.
- Product Building: Bootstrapped an early AI wrapper to $200k revenue, 93k signups with zero CAC growth... solo.
- Team Scaling: Grew junior engineers to autonomous project leads within 6 months
- Open Source: ~5 unique additions to public code in 2025, 2 contributions to open projects
- Cross-Functional: Design, engineering, operations, account management, sales, growth: proven ability to own multiple domains
Experience
Independent Research & Development
Self Employed, Canada, October 2024 - Present
Core Focus: Understanding how behavioral economics, cognitive science, and design can reduce friction in AI-human workflows—positioning expertise for roles in AI product, agentic systems, or developer tooling.
Developed specialized expertise in cognitive load optimization for AI-human interaction, achieving Top 0.5% global ranking on UXcel—combining neuro-behavioral research with practical UI/UX design.
Built canadian-startup-jobs (open source): A full-stack scraper aggregating Canadian tech employment opportunities—demonstrating end-to-end ownership from problem identification through system design and deployment.
Personal, Private Tooling: Created multiple tools to explore improving product development workflows:
- Yet Another Kanban optimized for sidebar use in tiling window managers / mobile as second-screen.
- Lamina for "laminating/delaminating" (MD <> HTML) from the command line.
- Fetch-MD CLI for pulling docs for local caching.
- mkcmd NPX util for making NPX utils.
- Iroshiki Tailwind Util for converting Linux ANSI-16 palettes (ie Aether themes) to tailwind rules for web.
Volunteer Open Source: Assisted with Build Canada's initiatives:
- Canadian Job Board MVP to collect all Canadian owned and operated startups (first sprint only - queue/call model for persistent programming, Firecrawl stealth scraping, agentic job tagging, tag/filter/paginated UI)
- Canada Spends Design Upgrade, and
- Build Canada's Design System for use across current and future Build Canada Adjacent subprojects.
Principal Product Engineer
Huzi AI, Remote (Portland), September 2023 - October 2024
Note: Code contributions are protected under NDA
Key Outcome: Transformed low-code, pre-seed, MVP idea to industry-standard, production, scalable business.
Transitioned the core app functionality from no-code MVP to secure, production-grade, and scalable infrastructure.
Designed and implemented novel, flexible, accessible AI UI systems using Next.js, Tailwind, and TypeScript, specifically optimizing for low-ICT skill real estate professionals.
Architected several harnesses and patterns for improved Agentic AI observability, hardening, performance improvement, and cost reduction.
Engineered manual, multi-agent document orchestration workflows in TypeScript/Bun for complex business documents (OCR, Entity Extraction, Structured Schema outputs), pioneering an in-house solution before standard orchestration libraries (Vercel AI SDK) were commercially available.
Mentored and scaled the team's operational capacity by creating a pedagogical management framework, accelerating junior engineers to autonomous project leads within six months, ensuring sustainable, accelerated operations.
Technical Solo Founder
GPTBoss, Canada, December 2022 - March 2024
Note: GPTBoss is currently defunct, intentionally.
Key Outcome: Tight, independent $0-$200k/y by performing all key business functions. Solo!
Zero-to-One Growth: Bootstrapped an AI-persona platform to 93,000 signups and $200k revenue within the first year with $0 CAC.
Early LLM Pioneering: Developed persona-based "Latent Space Mining" architectures using OpenAI davinci models prior to the release of GPT-3.5-turbo, achieving parity with early ChatGPT-style interaction models.
Stateful Meta-Prompting: Created a persistent context engine and configurable memory system, allowing users to progressively improve their chat experiences and transform structured data (JSON, CSV, Google Sheets) via a stateful REST API.
Agentic Research: Engineered a custom, pre-SDK tool-calling flow for internet search, utilizing Server-Sent Events (SSE) for informing users of task progress and string-matching to interrupt the traditional turn model and achieve long-lived task running.
Full-Stack Orchestration: Designed and implemented a high-concurrency architecture using Next.js, Express, and Supabase to handle batch transformation tasks across diverse business verticals.
Design, Engineering, Operations
Raid Guild (Worker Owned Co-Op), Colorado (Remote), August 2021 - February 2023
Note: Git contributions were anonymized for security, as one does with crypto.
Key Outcome: Tight, profitable, business-oriented agency development cycles without management.
Unequal Effort: Acted as a fluid cross-functional resource "Warrior" (Front End), "Cleric" (Account Management), "Wizard" (Blockchain Engineering), and "Archer" (Design) within a 150-person decentralized mercenary collective, personally contributing to 80% of the Guild’s project portfolio across development, design, and account management.
Sales & Account Management: Nurtured leads to conversion (deposit, escrow, scoping, technical architecture) and oversaw projects to completion.
UX/UI: Contributed to internal package of reusable TSX for common tasks across company projects; worked with other engineers and clients to approve lo-fi wireframes, IA/service design, hifi mocks, and prototypes (Figma) where projects called for this work.
Technical Versatility: Directly wrote, tested, and audited multiple Solidity smart contracts; deployed complex blockchain data storage solutions including on-chain SVG; deployed complex monorepos and SSG web3 webapps.
Growth Engineer
Marley Baird Media, Remote (Edmonton), May 2019 - January 2020
Note: Code, Copy, and Creative contributions are lost :(
Key Outcome: +400% ARR within 6 months.
Full Funnel Ownership: Directly managed advertising across self-serve digital platforms (Meta, YouTube, Google); designed and coded Ruby on Rails-based front ends, wrote Express backends for lead routing & nurturing.
Product Development: Researched and created new niche products and services to flesh out onboarding / conversion; work still in use today.
Quadrupled revenue from $500k to $2m through effective creative, targeting, nurturing, and offer presentation.
Direct Consultant for the Shark Group, the advertising services group founded by Daymond John from Shark Tank fame.
IT Director / Sysadmin
Willowbrook Chrysler, Langley, February 2017 - May 2019
Note: Code, Copy, and Creative contributions are lost :(
Key Outcome: Back office system mastery.
Directed Digital Transformation: Upgraded systems &s; staff to cloud services for comms &s; CRM, eg Google Workspace, VOIP, Hubspot CRM
Directed Digital Marketing: Meta, Google (Search, Display, & YouTube) ads + Full Stack Lead Capture mini-apps, custom round-robin lead sorting (BulmaCSS, HTML, raw JS, Express.JS backend), contributed ~$80m in revenue.
Network Management: Held personal responsibility over the networking installation and maintenance for 80 employees, digital security systems, CDRJ OEM tools. Yes, I run cable too!
Inventory: Owned and directed the process for maintaining parity with ERP systems and actual lot inventory; product photography; final check between unload/trade-in and test drives. Yes, I've driven Corvettes! They are very small!
Recruiting: Owned digital sales staff recruitment channel; performed initial inventory filtering and screening interviews; owned onboarding for digital & security systems
Intern
Studiothink, Surrey, September 2016 - December 2016
Note: Code, Copy, and Creative contributions are lost :(
Key Outcome: Learned the ropes at a creative branding studio, focus on tight turnaround times and comprehensive utility.
Industry Training: Learned and contributed to sprint cycles (Kanban); PHP via Concrete5, HTML Email, Bootstrap, Wordpress - basics!
Branding Exposure: Contributed to and developed digital evidence of brand systems and service design blueprints