Aric Camarata

I started building software the same way I learned most things in my life: by necessity, from scratch, without a map. Taught myself to code in high school. Joined the Army in 2001 as a Cavalry Scout, served honorably through 2004. My first engineering job at Roxbury Group came straight out of service — deploying Windows networks, building inventory software. From there it was AT&T, Apple, Pearson, and eventually Northrop Grumman as a TS-cleared Lead Developer and Systems Architect.

Northrop was the real turning point. The Treasury GSOC engagement — cybersecurity observability for U.S. Treasury — was where I went deep on distributed systems at scale. Hadoop, Hive, HBase, Cassandra. Led a team through the full software lifecycle under a 24/7 multi-site DR SLA. That experience shaped the way I think about architecture: every system has a seam where independent pieces need to compose into a single coherent behavior. That seam is where the real engineering happens.

In 2014 I went fully entrepreneurial. Founded Unity Platforms, built Flock and Veterans social platforms on top of multi-tenant Next.js with Hasura row-level security and JWT-based tenant isolation. Took enterprise contracts along the way. The decade of product work crystallized the pattern I keep returning to: not one giant monolith, but composable systems with clean boundaries, routed intelligently.

Since 2020 I've been building nSelf — a self-hosted PaaS platform in Go with 30+ CLI commands, single-command deploy to a $4/mo VPS, and a plugin architecture with 55+ commercial integrations via federated GraphQL. Since 2024 the primary focus has been nClaw: a multi-model AI router with a classifier-driven tier ladder (local Ollama, Gemini, Claude), hybrid retrieval combining tsvector + pgvector + RRF fusion + BGE-M3 cross-encoder reranking. The routing logic alone cuts inference costs 60% vs naive model-first dispatch.

I take remote C2C contracts as Principal Engineer or Principal AI Engineer. Best fit: hard architectural problems, AI infrastructure, distributed backends, or anywhere there's a seam that hasn't been properly joined yet.