Accountable Engineering for Intelligent Systems

I work with companies deploying complex, data-driven systems into real products and operations, where correctness, security, and long-term reliability directly affect your business.

As adoption of automation and machine-assisted development accelerates, many teams can generate code quickly but struggle with responsibility and risk. When these systems move from experimentation into production workflows and business-critical operations, gaps in oversight can lead to data loss, security exposure, operational downtime, or costly rewrites. Automation accelerates development, but it does not replace engineering judgment.


Mackley Studios bridges that gap. With over twenty years of professional development experience, I help growing teams and established companies monitor, correct, and stabilize production systems so they can be trusted over time. When automation reaches its limits, human judgment and engineering accountability take over.

Allen Mackley
Allen Mackley
Founder and Principal Engineer, Mackley Studios

Making modern software systems reliable in real production environments.

Mackley Studios operates as a productized engineering service, providing ongoing technical oversight, system improvements, and advanced automation integration without the overhead of expanding internal teams. Engagements are structured as ongoing partnerships, not one-off projects, so systems remain stable and trustworthy as architectures, data, and business requirements change. Work focuses on integrating intelligent components into existing systems, orchestrating workflows across services, and continuously evaluating behavior in production environments.

Services include

  1. AI system oversight and engineering
  2. Data science and distributed systems
  3. Web and mobile application development
  4. Cybersecurity and reliability engineering

Experience

Two decades of product and platform leadership.

2020 — 2024

Technical Lead

Grow.com by Epicor

Grow is a business intelligence platform that unifies data visualization, data warehousing, and ETL workflows into a single application, allowing customers to view the status, health, and analytics of their data pipelines from one platform.


Joined Grow to improve and stabilize the mobile application, aligning it with the web platform to create a unified customer experience. Worked across front-end, back-end, and DevOps layers to integrate the mobile app with a distributed systems architecture and support real-time data updates. Contributed during a period of company growth that culminated in Grow’s acquisition by Epicor, with the mobile application becoming a core part of the product experience for executive and operational users.

2019 - 2020

Senior Backend Engineer

Jolt Software

Jolt is a business operations platform that focuses on task verification for businesses, particularly in the food and safety industry.


Joined Jolt following a funding round to support platform scaling and infrastructure maturity. Developed and maintained scalable backend systems with a focus on performance and reliability, working across multiple engineering teams to deliver production-ready software. Contributed to building and stabilizing core backend infrastructure as the platform scaled to support rapid growth and market leadership.

2017 - 2018

Senior Software Developer

foreUP Golf

Web-based operations application for golf course managers and their employees.


Contributed across a broad technology stack during a pivotal growth phase, helping foreUP bootstrap new product designs for the golf industry. Work included developing new web modules such as automated email, notification, and payment processing systems, as well as designing data APIs to support an internal app marketplace.

2013 — 2016

Director of Platform & Quality Assurance

cmiVFX / cmiUniverse

Video training platform for visual effects artists, paired with an integrated project management system and a suite of video and 3D editing tools designed for production workflows in the visual effects industry.


At cmiVFX, rebuilt a global profit-sharing training marketplace, modernized subscription and payment services, and collaborated with visual effects instructors worldwide who produced instructional content for the platform. For cmiUniverse, built a project management system and a suite of browser-based video and 3D editing tools designed for production workflows in the visual effects industry, including custom playback and editing interfaces, resizable windowing systems, visual effects tooling, secure content delivery, media encoding pipelines, theming and color systems, and real-time synchronization across tabs and mobile devices.

2011 — 2013

Senior Software Engineer

Connect AI

Custom software development firm.


Worked on data-intensive web applications across engineering, media, and financial domains, with a focus on performance, security, and correctness. Contributions included front-end development for a NASA engineering services contractor on a multi-level personnel and inventory system requiring real-time calculations across large datasets in a secured remote environment. Additional work involved building OAuth-based integrations that combined social network data with syndicated news sources for personalized content delivery, as well as developing high-performance, spreadsheet-style budgeting tools with dynamic calculations and interactive data visualizations backed by a PHP service layer.

2006 — 2010

Technical Consultant

La Grande Online

Community-focused web platform providing local news, business listings, and web design services for small businesses in the La Grande region.


Web software developer providing design and development services for local news, business directories, and client websites. Work included UI and UX design, front-end development with HTML and CSS, media and graphical design, database administration, and direct collaboration with business owners to plan and build production websites. Responsibilities also included administering the La Grande Online news platform using CodeIgniter, Drupal, and WordPress, as well as developing custom front-end experiences and digital advertising assets for local businesses and venues.

Various

Additional Independent Work

Selected Projects

Independent and contract engineering work delivered alongside primary roles.


Through Mackley Studios, delivered software engineering and consulting work across a range of client and internal projects. This included building booking, calendar, and payment systems for a vacation rental business, contributing to marketplace-style platforms, and providing contract engineering support for established SaaS products in business intelligence, golf course management, and visual effects training. Additional work included maintaining and extending production systems after founder transition, delivering targeted WordPress implementations, and developing internal tooling such as Novelist, a web application for organizing complex narrative structures, involving end-to-end system design, backend and database architecture, frontend development, and iterative product discovery.

Testimonials

A trusted partner for global teams.

There are a lot of webmasters around and then there is one master of web programming and development: Allen Mackley. He listens, iterates fast, and makes complex builds easy to use.

Elise Tak Painter & 3D Artist — cmiVFX collaborator

Allen has been a key factor in restoring previously damaged web applications and is an asset to quality control. I recommend him to anyone and rely on his research instincts.

Chris Maynard Owner, cmiStudios

You can shoot him an idea and he just makes it happen really quick. If you need anything web related, Allen is your man for the job.

Alvaro “Varomix” Castaneda VFX Artist & Generalist TD

Allen did a great job on application development for MoneySlinger. We had unique JavaScript interface requirements. Very satisfied with the end result.

Lee Roesner Entrepreneur & Finance Author