Otto Ops LLC
Email Resume

Otto Ops quadrangleColorado
7.5-minute series

Paul Otto

I build and run data, AI and platform systems, and for most of my career I've carried the pager for what I designed.

Email info@ottoops.com Read my resume GitHub

Contours of the Mount Blue Sky area, Clear Creek County, Colorado, 200-foot interval, from USGS 3DEP elevation data via AWS Terrain Tiles.

What I work on now

I'm a Principal Platform Engineer at Amplify Federal, where I support Second Front and Forterra. From 2020 to 2026 I worked on the US Air Force's Kessel Run program, first at Raft as principal architect for public cloud, then at Clarity leading the SRE team for ADCP.

Outside the day job I train and serve open-weight models on a single RTX 5090 through Otto Ops, and I build the apps further down this page.

Platform engineering
Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD and FluxV2, observability on Elastic, and zero trust networking, mostly for military systems.
Model training and inference
Fine-tuning pipelines with SFT, DPO, continued pretraining, SLERP merges and GGUF export, a 4-bit QLoRA harness that fine-tunes a 19B-parameter Gemma 4 mixture-of-experts model on one 32 GB GPU, and llama.cpp serving watched by Prometheus, Grafana and Loki.
Data and retrieval
Knowledge graphs and vector search for retrieval, built on LightRAG with Neo4j, Milvus and bge-m3 embeddings. Before that came years of running MySQL, Galera, Kafka, Hadoop and Druid in production.

Apps from Otto Ops

Meal Planner

Live on Android and iOS

Meal Planner is for households that plan dinners together. You lay out the week, pull from a recipe library the whole household shares, and the plan becomes a grocery list that anyone in the house can check off at the store.

  • A week plan with navigation across multiple weeks
  • A shared recipe library with tags and privacy controls, and Claude to parse a recipe you paste in
  • A grocery list built from the plan and checked against your pantry, so you skip what you already have
  • Household groups with invites and an avatar for each member

Kotlin and Jetpack Compose on Android, SwiftUI and SwiftData on iOS, Firebase behind both.

Habit Quest

Early development

Habit Quest is a habit tracker built as an RPG. Each habit is a quest with a difficulty tier, finishing one pays out XP, gold and loot, and guilds take on raid quests together. You spend the gold in shops on a world map, like Gnome Depot and Flasks 5th Ave.

A React PWA plus an Expo app for phones, sharing the same game logic.

It's early, so expect rough edges.

ClearBridge

Sarah Otto and I co-founded ClearBridge Revenue Integrity Partners, a veteran-owned company in Denver that trains behavioral health teams on the revenue cycle.

Sarah built the ClearBridge Academy curriculum. As CTO, I build the cloud infrastructure, the data architecture and the Academy platform that delivers it, built for HIPAA compliance.

Visit cbrip.com

To empower behavioral health organizations through professional-grade training and modern learning technology.

The ClearBridge mission

About me

Paul Otto, smiling, in a green quarter-zip sweater, with autumn cottonwoods behind him
Aurora, Colorado

I wrote my first paid code in 1992, as a teenager at EG&G. From 1996 to 2003 I served in the US Army as an Armament Repair Section Sergeant.

After the Army I worked my way up the stack. I was an Oracle DBA at Qwest, a database engineer at Beatport, and a MySQL engineer at GoDaddy, where I supported MySQL on more than 2,400 high-traffic servers. Then I architected infrastructure and data services at TrackVia, ran my own consultancy, and walked Ticketmaster's teams from their own data centers to EC2, then to Kubernetes, then to EKS.

Because I've usually been the one paged when my systems break, I judge a design by whether a tired person can recover it at 3am. I've mentored military members, government civilians and contractors, and I count that as part of the job.

I live in Aurora, Colorado, and I've worked remotely for about ten years.

  • MS, Organizational Leadership
  • BS, Business Administration, cum laude
  • US Army veteran
  • CompTIA Security+

Career

  1. EG&G1992
  2. US Army1996
  3. Qwest2008
  4. Beatport2010
  5. GoDaddy2011
  6. TrackVia2012
  7. Otto Ops LLC2014
  8. Ticketmaster2017
  9. Raft2020
  10. Clarity2025
  11. Amplify Federal2026

The full history, with what I did at each stop, is on my resume.

On GitHub

9,485 contributions in the year to November 8, 2026, counted the way my GitHub profile counts them, private repositories included.
  • unridden Python

    A decision API on Gemma 4 26B-A4B that reads answers from the label logits and never generates a token. It scored 0.931 accuracy on 1,286 questions across seven hand-written suites, at about 180 ms median per request on one RTX 5090.

  • ottomation Python

    My Claude Code plugin marketplace, including live-vibe, a full-duplex voice plugin that stops on your first word.

  • prehend Python

    A recursive language model harness that adds experience memory and self-reflective program search to the MIT rlms engine.

  • Forks and the company org

    I keep forks of llama.cpp, vllm and herdr. The OttoOps organization holds the company repositories.

Contact

Email is the fastest way to reach me or Otto Ops, including for Meal Planner support.

info@ottoops.com