About Billy
AI Engineering Lead at Nava PBC, where I’ve spent almost seven years building software for federal and state government.
Right now I work on AI strategy and architecture for a state unemployment system. I’ve put an LLM system into production for a state agency, helped an agency approve its first agentic AI coding tool, and built the infrastructure that lets other teams do the same. I still build hands-on every day.
I also spent more than a decade as a photographer and filmmaker, and I play keytar and drums in two bands. That’s where my eye for design and my patience for craft come from.
HIGH SCORE
| Rank | Skill | Tools |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | AGENTIC AI | CLAUDE CODE · CODEX · MCP · AGENT WORKFLOWS |
| 2 | LLM SYSTEMS | CLAUDE ON BEDROCK · RAG · OPEN-WEIGHT MODELS |
| 3 | AI EVALUATION | RUBRIC SCORING · LLM-AS-JUDGE · HUMAN REVIEW |
| 4 | AI GOVERNANCE | AI POLICY · SECURITY APPROVAL · COST ATTRIBUTION |
| 5 | LEADERSHIP | 100-PERSON PROGRAMS · COACHING · STAKEHOLDERS |
| 6 | AWS + TERRAFORM | LAMBDA · OPENSEARCH · EVENTBRIDGE · CLOUDFRONT |
| 7 | PYTHON | SQLALCHEMY · POSTGRESQL · PYTEST |
| 8 | TYPESCRIPT | REACT · NEXT.JS · USWDS |
| 9 | COMPLIANCE | IRS-1075 · NIST 800-53 · WCAG 2.1 AA |
Ride the cyan light cycle with the arrow keys or WASD. On a touch screen, tap left or right to turn.
Experience
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2020–present
Nava PBC
Almost seven years at a public benefit corporation that builds government services, across CMS, the Department of Justice and New Jersey.
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Principal AI Engineering Lead 2026–present
AI strategy and architecture for a state unemployment system, across AI special projects and mainframe modernization. I also run weekly AI Engineering Office Hours for Nava’s ~300-person engineering org.
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Principal Software Engineering Manager & Engineering Contract Lead, State Unemployment Modernization 2023–2025
Co-led the program as it grew from about 50 to 100 people. Shipped the new Intake Application and cut its P99 latency from 15+ minutes to under a second; the modernization won a 2024 Government Experience Award. Raised the team’s eNPS from 13 to 55.
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Engineering Team Lead / Senior Software Engineer, DOJ ADA.gov & Civil Rights Portal 2021–2022
Led Nava’s Department of Justice work and delivered the new ADA.gov, winner of the Service to the Citizen Award. Made civilrights.justice.gov 5x faster and cut the backlog of unanswered reports by 80%.
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Senior Software Engineer, CMS Cloud 2020–2021
Built APIs, front end and high-availability AWS infrastructure for cloud.cms.gov, and set up Nava’s first QA process and CI/CD.
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Before 2020
Astraea · Silverchair · Center for Open Science
Senior front-end developer and UI designer on a geospatial platform, UI developer for scholarly publishing, and full-stack developer on the Open Science Framework.
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2002–2017
Billy Hunt Photography · Powhatan Studios
Photography for clients including John Grisham and The Washington Post, video for Dave Matthews Band, then a web and mobile studio.
B.S. Computer Science, James Madison University · AWS Certified AI Practitioner · Nielsen Norman Group UX Certification
Work
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terraform-aws-claude-code-bedrock
Claude Code on Amazon Bedrock with per-developer cost tracking and budget controls, so agencies can run agentic coding inside their own AWS boundary.
Open source
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Aida
Drafts appeal decisions for a state agency’s examiners with Claude on Bedrock and retrieval grounded in state law. Every draft is scored against a rubric, with human review.
Client work
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AI-assisted COBOL documentation
A legacy mainframe codebase documented in months instead of years, as the baseline for its modernization.
Client work
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Finchy
A policy RAG assistant grown from a Slack bot into web, Slack, REST API and MCP, at a fraction of the cost of a full drafting system.
Client work
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Unanet MCP server
Maps a 1,267-operation ERP API into safe-read tools for AI assistants, with human review on writes.
Open source
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Nava QuickLaunch
Turns AI-built tools into secured sites in minutes. Hosts 6+ apps, including C-suite dashboards built by non-engineers.
Internal · Nava
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Ravens agent fleet
A hardened fleet of Claude and Codex coding agents: scripts, templates and a security model for running agents in parallel.
Private
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pi-code-modernization
Structured, approval-gated legacy-code modernization workflows.
Open source
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Alethia
A macOS markdown editor where the markdown renders in place as you type.
Open source
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pixelstick-bitmaps
Bitmaps I made for light painting with the Pixelstick, where the code and the camera meet.
Open source
Design systems
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Lisa
A neon, 90s-school-supplies design system with Day and Dusk modes: rules, tokens, a stylesheet and a live specimen.
Open source
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Alethia design system
The visual language of the Alethia markdown editor: paper ground, hard black rules, one hot orange.
Open source
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herdr-lisa
Lisa for the Herdr desktop app and oh-my-pi: themes, layouts and a small animal for every project.
Open source
Photography
Portraits, events and film for clients including John Grisham, The Washington Post and Dave Matthews Band.
Film
Documentary and music video work.
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CLAW: The Collective of Lady Arm Wrestlers
A feature documentary I co-directed with Brian Wimer on the arm-wrestling league that started in Charlottesville and spread to cities around the world, raising over $250,000 for charity.
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Da Bird
A music video for We Are Star Children, performed by The Hollywood Theatre Lab, made with Amoeba Films.
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Birdlips
A music video for “Under Crooked Trees,” from the album One Tongue.
Music
Keytar and drums.
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Dystaron
A D.C. trio with Jason Hamacher and Dave NeSmith, somewhere between post-hardcore, synthwave and ambient. I play keytar.
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Buck Gooter
Harrisonburg’s “primal industrial blues” band, around since 2005. I joined in 2023 on keytar and drums.
Watch “Tusks” live (2024) · Listen to “King Kong Lives” (2025)
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Corn Rocket
My band in 1993.
What people say
“Billy is exactly what we all want in a vendor/partner. He helps you see what could be, helps you decipher the professional, monetary and personal cost it might take you to get there, and prepares you with the information you need to make a decision. … He is honest, straightforward, and a true thought-leader.”
“Billy preceded and has stayed at the forefront of AI capability at Nava. Before the decision to become an AI native organization, … Billy was evaluating the landscape, finding the wins, and documenting the misses for others to learn from. He established high delivery agent supported development teams.”
“Billy was my direct boss and throughout his tenure as my manager he was empowering, connected me with opportunity, and focused fiercely on getting things done. … He also possesses qualities rare amongst engineering leadership: the ability to flex into technical details and people details as needed.”
Contact
Email billy@billyhunt.com or find me on LinkedIn and GitHub.