Trey Hutcheson

I’m a staff-level engineer with about 30 years of building software — distributed systems, cloud platforms, mobile products, and the internal tooling that holds it all together. Since the summer of 2025 I’ve been running Cone Crows LLC, shipping real products end-to-end: backend APIs, mobile apps, web consoles, SDKs, billing, the works. Before that I spent nearly a decade at Motorola Solutions architecting public safety communication systems, and a stint in fintech building anti-fraud platforms.

I am an AI True Believer, and leverage it as much as I can. LLMs are part of my daily workflow for architecture exploration, feature refinement, technical research, code generation, refactoring, testing, and documentation. The products I’ve shipped — four of them, across mobile, web, and developer tools — were built 100% through AI-augmented development. I know where the tools help and where they fall apart.

I’m looking for Staff or Principal Engineer roles at startups and smaller companies where I can move fast, own systems end-to-end, and help set technical direction. I want to be close to the code, close to the product, and surrounded by people who care about shipping.

I wrote my first production code at 20 for a startup called PageLaw building a bespoke matter-management application. That was 1997. I’ve been building ever since.

The dot-com era pulled me into Supersale.com, an early automotive dealer focused startup where I learned what it looks like when a company scales fast and then doesn’t. It was a crash course in building, and delivering, under pressure and wearing multiple hats.

Then came Arbitron: 14 years of industry evolution. I watched the same core products move from native desktop (VB6, Delphi, MSVC++) to early .NET adoption and 3 tier architectures, to java swing applications, then to full on java EE and spring web apps. I learned to think in failure modes, service integration and apis, and long-horizon maintenance. Furthermore, I was an early adopter of Agile/Scrum and TDD principles, as early as 2004.

Jack Henry & Associates followed, which allowed me to fully leverage prior experience to prototype and build multiple distributed systems in the Fraud / Anti Money Laundering (AML) space. This is where I learned technologies and tools such as Cassandra, Kafka, Spark, Hadoop, and Elasticsearch.

Motorola Solutions was the next chapter - public safety communication systems where downtime means someone doesn’t get help. Real-time media transport, cloud-native 911 infrastructure, WebRTC streaming from citizens to dispatchers. Later I moved from architect to engineering manager, but always provided technical leadership. In my time as manager, I led multiple microservice teams, a platform engineering and support team, a networking team, a security team, and an observability team.

The consistent thread across all of this is adaptation. Every technological era I’ve lived through has demanded a willingness to throw away what I knew and learn the next thing. Client-server to web, monolith to services, on-prem to cloud, manual to automated, and now AI.

That last shift is the one I’m most excited about. I started Cone Crows because of my passion project, Builds. I didn’t do it because of AI, but in the process of that implementation, I learned to fully embrace AI. The experience was transformative, and the gains have been real. I’ve been able to scratch practically every creative itch as they’ve happened, while still building real products and solving real problems.

I’m actively looking for my next role. If you’re building something interesting and need someone who can own systems end-to-end, I’d love to talk.