Julio M Cruz
Senior Software Engineer · Cloud, AI, secure systems

Julio M Cruz

You are looking at 25 years of software that works: six under a Top Secret clearance at SBA and State, enterprise before that, and AI infrastructure I built and operate today.

Now

Shipping production systems.

I founded PerkOS to bring AI teams to small businesses at prices they can afford: a workspace where a business hires AI teammates in one click, running on infrastructure I designed, built, and operate. I founded zkNexus. Both are active.

Most of what I build is open: 165 own public repositories, three agent runtimes packaged as container images, and systems that run in government, enterprise, and onchain environments.

25+Years shipping production software
6Years TS-cleared, SBA and State
165Own public repositories on GitHub
3Agent runtimes in production

The arc
September 2025 to now

Building PerkOS full time

Left the clearance job to build AI-agent infrastructure full time: Next.js and TypeScript product surfaces, an OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway, provisioning on AWS ECS Fargate, Stripe and onchain billing. Product decisions, code, and operations, end to end.

2019 to 2025 · Washington DC

Top Secret clearance

Senior software engineer for the U.S. federal government. The Small Business Administration from 2019 to 2021, then the Department of State from 2021 to 2025: C#, .NET, Azure, and identity work with OKTA, Azure AD and OAuth. Systems where a mistake is expensive.

2021 to 2025 · Nights and weekends

Onchain, in parallel

165 public repositories built alongside the clearance job. Solidity, TypeScript, payment rails. A blockchain credential from MIT Professional Education.

2008 to 2019 · Virginia

Enterprise systems

Six years on corporate infrastructure at JACER. Five as lead developer at Contensive, on e-commerce and mission-critical systems, owning requirements through post-production support.

2001 to 2005 · Lima, Peru

Where it started

Analyst programmer at the National Office of Electoral Processes, database engineer at the Ministry of Economy and Finance, software architect at AVATAR. I learned to build inside under-resourced institutions.

April 2020

The week that decided what I would build for.

I was a contractor engineer inside the Small Business Administration when the Paycheck Protection Program launched: forgivable loans that decided whether a restaurant, a shop, or a two-person agency survived the year. The systems were not built for it.

Paycheck Protection Program opens. A nation of small businesses arrives at once.
E-Tran, the loan portal, goes down. Unreachable for up to four hours.
A new entry point into the loan system ships. Built with AWS.
381,000 loans · $100 billion · 3,600 lenders, by that afternoon.
Funding exhausted. More than one million small businesses approved.

The SBA normally backs about $25 billion a year in 7(a) loans. PPP asked the same infrastructure to move that in days, roughly fifty times normal capacity. At that volume the hard part is never the feature. It is consistency under load, recovery you can trust, and designing for the failure rather than the demo, because a partial write is somebody's payroll.

Every one of those millions of clicks was an owner trying to keep their business alive. That is the same person I build for now.

Timeline corroborated by contemporaneous reporting, including American Banker, "After opening-day fiasco, SBA upgrades lender portal with Amazon assist."

The record

37 hackathon awards since 2022. Twelve first places.

Working prototypes under 48-hour deadlines: AI agents, payments, identity. A prize at each of the three in-person ETHGlobal hackathons in 2026 so far.

ETHGlobal Lisbon · EQLTYThe Graph · Best AI Use Case · 1st
ETHGlobal New York · Stream VaultsUniswap Foundation 2nd · Ledger AI Agents 4th
ETHGlobal Cannes · Flow BrokerUniswap Foundation 3rd · Chainlink CRE
ETHDenver · SWARM1st · On-chain automation, Hedera
ETHGlobal Prague · KairosFlare main track · 1st
Seven more selected wins
HackMoney · UniPerkENS · Integrate ENS · Prize pool
ETHGlobal Cannes · PolyBetFinalist
Base Batches LatAm · AI ART3 HUBWinner
ETHSF · My MomentsBase, 3rd
Agentic Ethereum · InfinityCoinbase AgentKit
Base Around The World LatAm · CrediTalentWinner
ETHGlobal San Francisco · AurumChronicle, 1st

Full record on GitHub ↗



Contact

When your team needs someone who ships software that works, write me.