operations leader · full-stack builder

Aaron Simo.
I scale technical teams and build the systems that let them perform.

I build and ship full-stack products on my own, from the database to the deploy pipeline to the app people actually use. These days I run the US workshop for a photobooth manufacturer and help coordinate fulfillment, so a few thousand devices a month pass through my team, along with the dashboards and test rigs that keep them moving. Before that I spent eight years fixing avionics in the Navy. The thread through all of it is simple enough: I like making things work reliably, and I like building the tools that make the next person's job easier.

aasimo13@gmail.com · 586-344-1284 · LinkedIn ↗ · Clinton Township, MI
the centerpiece · a living experiment

Operant

A persistent reinforcement-learning organism, shaped forever by everyone who visits.

A small learning mind lives on a server and never stops. It moves, it learns, and every visitor who has ever been here has changed it a little, permanently, through reward and punishment. Nothing is ever undone. It's part art installation and part engineering piece, inspired by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu's Can't Help Myself and by simulation theory. Built as a TypeScript monorepo: a framework-agnostic Q-learning core, an always-on simulation host that owns and persists the single agent, and a react-three-fiber 3D view for observers, with the learning core kept strictly decoupled from rendering.

TypeScript Reinforcement learning · Q-learning Node.js React · react-three-fiber pnpm monorepo Railway · GitHub Pages
01 Projects
live · web + iOS

A family-management app with AI-assisted meal planning, smart shopping lists, shared finances, scheduling, and chore gamification. Shipped on the web and the App Store, built and deployed solo: a web frontend, a Supabase Postgres backend with row-level security and hardening migrations, edge functions on a GitHub Actions pipeline, and an iOS build with Apple in-app purchases. It's my biggest project, and I designed, built, deployed, and have maintained all of it.

Supabase / Postgres Row-Level Security Edge Functions iOS · App Store Apple IAP GitHub Actions CI/CD Vercel AI-assisted features

Argus

fully-local AI home monitor · self-hosted
AI / inference

A fully-local, AI-powered home-monitoring and face-recognition system for Home Assistant. No cloud, and everything runs on your own hardware. It's three cooperating services: a Watcher that snapshots the home's state every few minutes and asks an LLM "is anything actually wrong?" (a hardened, high-signal prompt with an urgent-push vs. daily-digest policy); a Recognizer running InsightFace on CPU, exposing a CodeProject.AI-compatible API to detect and identify faces on-device; and a Console that clusters unknown faces by similarity so you name a group once and it learns that person from then on. Pure logic is unit-tested; the container and glue layers are dry-run-verified.

Python LLM reasoning loop InsightFace On-device / CPU inference Face recognition Home Assistant · AppDaemon Docker / Compose Flask API Pytest
live pilot

A multi-tenant SaaS platform for lawn-care and snow-removal contractors. It handles digital contracts with e-signature, professional invoicing, online payments via Square, and a customer database, all in one place, on a free-trial-to-subscription model ($29–39/mo) with a live pilot customer. I built and deployed it solo. The interesting part is the multi-tenant architecture: keeping each contractor's data, contracts, and billing isolated on shared infrastructure.

Multi-tenant SaaS E-signature contracts Square payments Subscription billing Firebase Google Cloud Vercel

gutter.guru

gutter.guru ↗
live business

A website and CRM I built for Guys Gutters LLC to manage customers, jobs, and scheduling. I designed and deployed it for a real, operating business. It's a purpose-built tool that replaces spreadsheets and scattered notes with one system the company actually runs on.

Full-stack web app CRM Scheduling Custom domain

MiLa Test Station

hardware + software · automated QA
test automation

A Raspberry Pi automated pass/fail test rig for USB microphone units. It plays a frequency sweep, records it back, and validates the capture in about five seconds, with automated plug-in triggering, GPIO LED/beep output, and a self-calibration routine. I built it to make device validation fast, repeatable, and hard to get wrong on a busy line.

Raspberry Pi Python GPIO Audio DSP / signal validation Automated QA Self-calibration
02 Also built
Custom test fixtures KRUU workshop
Pass/fail test rigs and fixtures for the production line beyond MiLa, built to standardize validation and speed things up.
Internal dashboards ops tooling
Real-time dashboards giving the team visibility into device availability, throughput, and first-pass yield.
Hardware & 3D printing maker
Designed printable parts and device enclosures to spec, tuned print profiles, and did board-level repair and soldering work.
Experiments prototypes
A steady stream of prototypes. The way I learn a new tool is by shipping something with it.
03 About
85
technicians led
(Navy avionics)
$79M
cost savings delivered fleet-wide
~2,500/mo
devices fulfilled, peaking at 1,000/wk
$1–5M
device inventory managed

I lead technical teams and build the systems that help them move faster. My background is hands-on electronics, and most of my work has been keeping high-volume repair operations running, coordinating fulfillment, managing a few million dollars of inventory, and writing the internal tools that cut cost and keep things reliable.

Right now I lead workshop operations at KRUU US, a German-owned photobooth manufacturer, and I also coordinate fulfillment. I direct a team of up to eight people, we move around 2,500 devices a month, and I've built the repair workflows, test fixtures, and dashboards that raised our first-pass yield and gave everyone a live view of throughput. Before KRUU I spent eight years in the U.S. Navy as an aviation electronics technician and production supervisor, where I supervised 85 technicians keeping F/A-18E/F avionics running across 15 squadrons. Our maintenance work helped save $79M while holding 100% fleet availability.

It's all the same instinct, really. Whether it's a test rig that checks a device in five seconds, a dashboard that flags a bottleneck, or a SaaS backend that has to stay up for a paying customer, I care about getting things to work and building the thing that makes the next person's job easier. I also build full-stack software on my own, and I use AI tools like Claude, GPT, and Gemini every day in my technical work.

now
Lead, US Workshop Operations @ KRUU US Inc
building
HomeForge (web + iOS), Operant, Argus, Sodly, gutter.guru, MiLa Test Station
background
U.S. Navy avionics (AT2) · Six Sigma · Secret clearance (inactive)
stack
Python · TypeScript / React · LLMs & RL · Docker · Supabase / Postgres · Firebase · Vercel · iOS · Raspberry Pi
04 Contact

Open to engineering and engineering-leadership roles. Based in Clinton Township, MI. The fastest way to reach me: