A grimalkin is an old word for a wise, watchful cat.

iri bone, founder

iri is a language-agnostic staff engineer, repeat CTO, and team turnaround artist. Two decades of work run the full arc — greenfield prototypes to production systems handling millions of requests a day, individual contributor to executive — but the through-line is leverage: scaling companies by multiplying the output of the engineers around them, not just by adding zeros to a request counter.

The other through-line is immersion. The most useful second opinion comes from someone who understands what you're actually trying to build — so iri climbs far enough into a founder's head to learn the idea nearly as well as they do, and sometimes to see edges of it they haven't articulated yet.

Selected work

• EverBright (NextEra Energy Resources) — Staff Software Engineer. Rush-built a greenfield inventory service tracking $300M+ of safe-harbored solar equipment, launched on schedule under a policy deadline; led LLM-codegen adoption and guardrailing for the engineering org.
• Premise Data — Staff Engineer & Tech Lead/Manager. Founded the Product Foundations team from four predecessors: production-incident impact down ~80%, cloud spend down ~70%, roughly double the velocity on urgent work, and payment gateways handling ~$1M/quarter rewritten without interruption.
• Opolis — CTO. A classic turnaround: a payroll platform whose floating-point math left every paycheck off by cents. Fixed the money first, then migrated the monolith to Kubernetes — >$40M annualized payroll for ~400 members, in USD and stablecoins.
• Veri Labs — Interim CTO. Unblocked a team of nine that was struggling to ship; hit the key milestone and supported the launch customer with zero downtime.
• MilliporeSigma (via Pelotech) — Build-systems co-lead for 45+ applications behind a $3bn+ global e-commerce, teaching CI/CD and Kubernetes practice to teams in every timezone.
• Formidable — Senior engineer; backend and hiring lead. Built the hiring process from scratch (roughly employees 12 through 60) while leading backends for Walmart in-store search (>6M searches a day) and Microsoft's Hackbox (13M requests in two weeks at >99.9% success).
• Deciding Vote — CTO & cofounder. Question-based voter-matching platform, piloted with Senator Jeff Merkley and Rep. Joe Kennedy III.
• Amazon — Early cloud engineer. Built the game-streaming prototype demoed personally to Jeff Bezos (a precursor to Amazon Luna), shipped Appstore Test Drive through the infamous 2011 EBS outage without downtime, and authored the patents below.

On inherited codebases, the operating philosophy:

"I never see bad code written by someone else. I only see code that worked well enough for the company to succeed enough to hire me — so it's pretty good code."

That sympathy is load-bearing. Rescues go faster when nobody is litigating blame.

Lately iri works at the frontier of agentic development — including ai-lindale, a role-based multi-agent orchestration framework of original design, and side quests like an MCP server for navigating the Vatican's 2026 encyclical on AI. Not vibe coding; call it vibe engineering: a couple of hours spent carefully developing a spec can let an agent one-shot an entire ticket. Underneath every Grimalkin engagement is the same question: how much of the work can be offloaded to AI, and how much can we shrink the time between the decisions that genuinely need a human?

Patents

Seven US patents in cloud computing — CPU/GPU load balancing, distributed application delivery, and automated testing — with equivalents in other jurisdictions:

• US 8,830,245 — Load balancing between general purpose processors and graphics processors (2014)
• US 8,924,515 — Distribution of appliances over a dispersed network (2014)
• US 9,052,941 — Automated testing of online functionality providers (2015)
• US 9,052,959 — Load balancing between general purpose processors and graphics processors (2015)
• US 9,455,931 — Load balancing between processors (2016)
• US 9,699,024 — Distribution of applications over a dispersed network (2017)
• US 9,954,718 — Remote execution of applications over a dispersed network (2018)

B.A. Computer Science with honors, Grinnell College — capped by a mentored advanced project analyzing winners of the Hutter Prize for compression of human knowledge.

The team

Grimalkin runs lean by design. When an engagement calls for more hands or a specific specialty, iri brings in trusted collaborators — experienced engineers and operators who've earned a vouch — as contractors, with their consent.