José Miguel Hernandez

I build applied AI and the agent platforms other engineers ship on.

I'm a Staff Software Engineer in applied AI and agent platforms. I build agents, the guardrails that make them safe to run, and the tooling other engineers build on. I came up through design and frontend engineering, across social media, music and advertising, so I tend to work on both the interface someone touches and the platform underneath it.

I spent nine years at AdRoll. All nine, I worked on the component library 28 repositories depended on. I rebuilt the ad builder, and by fall 2025 about 250 advertisers were spending on ads built with it. In the last stretch I brought LLM agents into how our engineers work and into our design system. Before AdRoll, three of my companies were acquired, and I moved with the team each time.

github.com/jose-m-hernandez
6,807 contributions on GitHub in the last 46 weeks
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Morro Bay, California · remote

Background

Engineering roles across advertising, social products, games, and streaming media.

  1. AdRollStaff Software Engineer2017–2026Senior to Staff · Applied AI, Platform
  2. PandoraSenior Software Engineer, Consumer Electronics2015–2017Consumer Electronics, Chromecast
  3. RdioSenior Software Engineer2014–2015Partner Platforms, Device Runtimesacq. by Pandora, $75M
  4. TastemakerXSenior Software Engineer2013–2014Relaunch, Music Discoveryacq. by Rdio
  5. TellyLead Front-End Engineer2011–2012Social Video, Onboarding
  6. 50 CubesDirector of Activation2010–2011Social Platforms, Payments
  7. AOLSenior Software Engineer2008–2009Ad Tooling, Messaging
  8. BeboSenior Software Engineer, Ad Operations2006–2008Sponsorships, Ad Systemsacq. by AOL, $850M

Education

  1. UC Santa CruzFilm and Digital Media

Projects

  1. KidzoneMy kids and their friends design browser games here with an AI coding agent. They bring the idea, the agent builds a rough first draft, and we play it and refine it together. Built with dezi-bot; a CI check holds every game to its privacy rules.
  2. SuperkidsA points app for families. Kids earn credits, and both parents track the same list from their own phones. I rebuilt it as a multi-family Next.js and Supabase app with magic-link sign-in, where row-level security keeps each family's data apart.
  3. Harness ResearcherNot open sourcedA private lab where AI agents study how AI coding tools actually behave, with every finding sourced and graded for confidence. It's how I find out what a tool really does before I trust my work to it.
  4. XTreeJSAn homage to XTreeGold, the DOS file manager from the company my father co-founded. I vibe-coded it one night for fun, to see how far I could get: a terminal app in TypeScript on Bun that shipped with tests and CI.