Ken Barlow

Founder and CEO of Recovea.

My work is on AI agents that act in real systems, with a focus on making them safe and reliable.

Previously, I was CTO and co-founder of Allset, an AI platform for the services and trades industry.

Before that, I spent ten years as a principal software engineer and engineering manager, fully remote.

Earlier, I led an eight-engineer team at Nexio and built six web and mobile products at Start Studio.

I'm open to remote contract work and full-time roles helping teams build with AI. To talk, book a call.

For my code, see my GitHub. For my full background, see my LinkedIn.

Projects

Online rollout gate for prompt and model changes
A release controller that ships a prompt or model change through shadow traffic and a canary, and rolls it back on its own when live quality or safety drops. In progress.

Allset
An AI-native platform for the services and trades industry, built end to end with LLM workflows on Claude and OpenAI, and run through pilots with early users. CTO and co-founder, 2025 to 2026.
Authorization for every agent tool call
Zanzibar-style access control (SpiceDB) deciding what an agent may do, over an append-only audit log of every action. Allset.
Monolith to distributed Go services
A legacy .NET and Azure monolith re-architected onto AWS, reaching elite-range delivery: about a 15-minute lead time and several deploys a day. Principal software engineer, 2016 to 2026.
Identity for 3 million accounts
A zero-downtime, just-in-time migration on AWS Cognito, with MFA and passkeys. Principal software engineer.
An engineering organization from 3 to 15
Squads led by tech leads I developed, while I stayed the top committer at about 40% of the code. Engineering manager.
PCI-audited card processing
Card payments run through recurring external audits, with integrations across payments, tax, shipping and commerce systems. Principal software engineer.