I'm Clay Levering — Director of AI Engineering at TransPerfect, based in Los Angeles. For over fifteen years I've been building backend systems, hardening production platforms, and closing the gap between "it works in a demo" and "it survives real users, real load, and real auditors."
My path into tech wasn't the typical CS-degree route. I started as an Electrician's Mate on the USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63), where I learned that complex systems don't care about your excuses — they either work or they don't. That mindset stuck. After the Navy I earned a degree in Business Administration while moving into product management, then found my way back to the technical work I'd always gravitated toward.
Engineering Philosophy
I believe in measurable outcomes over theoretical elegance, and evidence over assertion. Performance metrics, cost optimization, security posture, and developer velocity aren't nice-to-haves — they're how you know the system is real.
I've driven initiatives that identified $180K+ in annual AWS savings while still massively optimizing the applications themselves (in some cases with 99% performance increases). I've also spent years on the less glamorous work: TPN / SOC 2 evidence discipline, Disney Tier-0 media controls, OIDC IdPs, credential hygiene, and adversarial reviews of inherited systems. Numbers matter. Receipts matter more.
Whether I'm tuning MySQL across millions of rows, designing video pipelines, standing up multi-tenant platforms for Fortune 500 media clients, or building agent harnesses that keep AI from inventing its own architecture and leaking keys along the way — the focus is the same: build systems that scale, maintain teams that ship, and solve problems that hit the bottom line without creating tomorrow's incident.
Career Arc
Navy → Sonos → Product Management → Software Architecture → Engineering Leadership → AI Engineering. Each step taught me something the others couldn't. The Navy taught systems thinking under pressure. Sonos taught community, consumer shipping, and mentoring technical support while feeding alpha/beta programs. Product management taught ruthless prioritization — from enterprise agile coaching at Bank of America to product vision at NovaStor. Seven years at Blu Digital Group (a TransPerfect subsidiary) put me deep in media supply-chain software for major studios — architecture, security, compliance, and on-call ownership, not just management. And now I get to combine all of it at the parent-company level.
Currently I am Director, AI Engineering at TransPerfect, owning cross-subsidiary AI adoption and the production path for agentic systems — harnesses, evaluation, cost controls, and security boundaries. Before that I led product engineering at Blu Digital Group. Before that I architected content services at Pluto TV during its hypergrowth phase.
AI Engineering & Security
AI without engineering discipline is just a faster way to accumulate debt. My work is the opposite of "paste a prompt and ship": agent harnesses that encode standards, evaluation loops, cost controls, fail-closed auth, and the same audit posture I'd put in front of a TPN reviewer — confirmed production evidence, source-defined behavior, and honest non-claims. No author audits their own output. Gates that cannot fail are not verification.
That stack of instincts comes from years of media-platform security (DRM, watermarking, SAML/OIDC, Tier-0 client requirements), building and hardening identity systems, and deep-reviewing foreign codebases until the real blast radius is visible. The public face of the doctrine is Building Like Claxx — twenty-six principles for shipping software that doesn't haunt you.
What Drives Me
I'm energized by the intersection of infrastructure, security, and product — not just how to build something, but why it matters and what happens when it fails. There's real satisfaction in taking a choking production path and making it run in milliseconds, designing a pipeline that handles hundreds of thousands of jobs a month without drama, or watching a team go from "we tried ChatGPT once" to a harness that ships with confidence and a clear threat model.
I'm also deeply invested in open craft — Building Like Claxx, Signalbox, Papercuts, claxxon-lint, and contributions across the Vue/Nuxt ecosystem.
Beyond the Terminal
When I'm not neck-deep in CloudWatch logs or writing Terraform, you'll find me in the kitchen. I'm an avid cook and my wife is an aspiring professional baker (Tammy Levering). Our house basically smells like your favorite brunch spot at all times.