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Sometimes Creek Ventures.

Sean Denton — engineer

I buildthings thatship.

I take systems from nothing to production and run them — backend, infrastructure, frontend, operations. Twenty-plus years of rockets, drive-thrus, hospitals, and tractors. It's just me. That's the point.

sean@sometimescreekventures.com

The list

Real things, told straight. No metrics theater — the work is the resume.

Rocket data.

Built the backend that ingests and processes Blue Origin’s proprietary rocket test telemetry — real-time, large-scale, locked down.

A drive-thru that listens.

R&D for Chick-fil-A: a voice-ordering system built in Swift on OpenAI and open-source LLMs, backend on Kubernetes — plus AI and VR prototypes for visualizing the store itself.

Human hearts.

A HIPAA cardiovascular remote-monitoring platform: five production Go services, device telemetry streaming through Redis hot storage into S3 archive, live clinical dashboards — designed, built, and operated in production alone. Deploys never blip a live monitoring session.

The 36-second request.

A mobile-ordering API was timing out for one request in ten. Built the k6 load-test platform and Grafana observability from scratch, found the thread-pool starvation, and drove p95s from 36 seconds to 95 milliseconds — proven against baselines before every merge.

220 days → 43.

A client had a 220-dev-day estimate on the table. Audited what already existed before writing anything new — the real number was 23–43 days, validated by their own engineers.

A Fortune-5 paved road.

At CVS Health, leading the squad building the platform that provisions Google Cloud services with zero manual steps — security by default, 15+ engineers shipping it.

The FBI is on line one.

For CLEAR: the microservice line that registers travelers for TSA PreCheck, integrating with the FBI through a third-party vendor — deployed to AWS GovCloud.

Fracking pumps over RS-232.

Petroleum engineer by degree, so: rescued a buggy fracking-truck pump-control system — rewrote the Java agents talking to hardware over UDP, RS-232, and TCP.

Tractors on the internet.

Grain carts run embedded Linux with no connectivity — so built the iOS app that finds them over Bluetooth LE and shares the iPad’s connection with the tractor.

Radios for soldiers.

For Harris: the app a soldier uses to configure a truckload of military radios at once instead of one at a time — wrote the entire UI.

250,000 players.

As CTO of a gaming startup, took a prototype to production: a real-time multiplayer social game sustaining 250K+ users and hundreds of simultaneous games.

Survives AWS going down.

For Comcast: a device-telemetry microservice designed to finish its job even while the cloud under it is failing — plus CI/CD where entire environments are created and destroyed in minutes.

Days of HR work → one click.

For Zappos: a one-source-of-truth system wiring HR, IT, payroll, and billing together — onboarding an employee went from days of emails to a single action.

A dungeon crawler over SMS.

Built a serverless AI assistant that lives entirely in text messages — including a full roguelike dungeon crawler you play by SMS, powered by Claude on Amazon Bedrock.

Talking instead of typing.

Built and released blurt and yap: push-to-talk dictation for macOS and Linux that runs entirely on-device, sub-second, no cloud — because talking to AI is half the job now and typing is the bottleneck.

Method

BaselineChangeLoad testProvePromote.

Stack

Languages.

Right tool, right layer — comfortable owning all of them at once.

  • Go
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • Java / Spring Boot
  • Swift
  • Node.js

Cloud.

AWS deep since before CDK existed; GCP at Fortune-5 scale; GovCloud when it has to be.

  • AWS (CDK, IoT Core, ECS/Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, VPC & Client VPN, Step Functions, Cognito, GovCloud)
  • Google Cloud (GKE, Vertex AI, PubSub)
  • Azure DevOps · AKS

Infrastructure as code.

If it isn’t in code, it doesn’t exist.

  • CDK
  • Terraform
  • CDKTF
  • Kubernetes (EKS · AKS · GKE)
  • Docker
  • ArgoCD

AI.

Cloud APIs to fully local models — shipped, not demoed.

  • OpenAI & open-source LLMs
  • Amazon Bedrock (Claude)
  • On-device speech (MLX, Parakeet, ONNX)
  • Multi-agent orchestration

Reliability & proof.

Every claim measured: load tests, dashboards, baselines.

  • k6
  • Grafana + InfluxDB
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Temporal
  • p95/p99 tail analysis
  • SLOs

Data & realtime.

MQTT to Redis to S3 — hot paths and cold storage.

  • MQTT
  • Redis
  • DynamoDB
  • Postgres
  • WebSockets / SSE
  • gRPC
  • Spark

Now

Me

I'm a petroleum engineer by degree — The University of Texas at Austin — who's spent twenty-plus years shipping software instead. I've been the CTO, the principal architect, the tech lead, and the contractor who parachutes in when it's on fire. I hold a patent on browser-based content protection, I speak about this stuff in public, and I work from Georgetown, Texas.

Full stack means all of it: set the vision with your founders in the morning, design the data model at lunch, code in review by the end of the day. I lead teams when there's a team and carry the whole thing when there isn't. What I care about is the product actually leaving the building — not the deck about it.

The company is Sometimes Creek Ventures because that's what's on the land here: a Hill Country creek that runs dry most of the year, then runs hard when the rain comes. Dormant channel, full capacity on demand. That's the deal.

Names from along the way: Blue Origin · CVS Health · Chick-fil-A · Comcast · General Motors · Clear · Amtrak · Kubota · Harris · Zappos · Walmart · T-Mobile · Trane · iMemories · Cardio · Zonal — plus a patent (US 8,887,290 B1) and a stack of stories that don't fit on a website.