Staff Software Engineer
Jonathan Leahy
Staff Engineer at Pismo — cloud-native payments platform, acquired by Visa for $1B. 84 investigations across 10 languages on the side, focused on AI systems and new ways of building software.
Pismo 
VisaWhat I Do
Pismo was a startup when I joined. Go microservices on Kubernetes with Istio, event-driven on AWS — replacing legacy banking infrastructure for clients worldwide. 99.99% uptime. Day to day it's Go, APIs, BFFs, Kubernetes infrastructure, React, micro-frontends for isolation, TDD, hexagonal architecture, CI/CD — working in a squad of 8, a tribe of 30, in a company of hundreds.
Before that: Dev Team Lead at Propel Finance, Principal Developer at AKE International, and a lot of years across everything from FoxPro to React Native.
Every era — mainframes to microservices, FoxPro to Go — taught something the next one needed.
AI is the latest shift. Three decades of knowing where the problems hide turns out to be exactly the context you need to use it well.
How I Work With AI
Autonomous Systems
AI agents running the full dev cycle — brainstorm to deployment — without human intervention. A self-improving 8-stage pipeline.
AI-Assisted Development
A structured methodology for AI pair programming. Repeatable, not ad hoc.
Multi-Agent Systems
Autonomous agents with distinct strategies — cooperative, competitive, deceptive — negotiating in structured rounds.
