Will Schmierer III / Always building
Engineering Leader · Frontend / Full-Stack · AI Systems That Ship · Remote
Twenty years shipping production systems, the last 18 fully remote. I care about experience, clear communication, and systems that work. Tech should enhance the human experience. AI should amplify what people can do. I want a remote full-time seat with teams pushing what's possible.
Tools, client work, and ideas I keep building on. Each is a different view of how I think and what I can bring to a team.
Design training, critique, and systems thinking. A foundation for shaping experiences around people.
Engineering and leadership at WebDevStudios, with client work including Microsoft and the NBA.
Trades, client operations, and community building. Firsthand context for the problems worth solving.
Open-source tool
Client handoffs often start with missing information. I built a CLI that gathers public domain, DNS, hosting, and website clues into a planning brief before the first conversation.
Explore the code →
Product thinking · Diagnostics
A way to understand who controls a business’s domain, DNS, email, and hosting before a rebuild or handoff. A recurring operational problem turned into a tool.
Explore Groundwork →
Product · Field workflows
Turning job-site photos into marketing, with people in the approval loop. The product idea comes from understanding the field work and the business around it.
Explore FieldContent →
Client delivery
AI transformations for the trades. Foundation first, not tools slapped on chaos. The work includes the build, the operating details, and a handoff the owner can use.
See client work →
Writing from the work
Field notes on building with AI, leading teams, and keeping production work honest. What I’m trying, what’s working, and what still needs fixing.
Production operations
Led incident response across 350 WordPress environments: triage, malware remediation, compromised account cleanup, and hardening. Part of owning the platform when the stakes are real.
Read the experience →
Community & publishing
The recovery community and podcast I founded after my stroke. A place for survivors to share experience, ask difficult questions, and keep building a life after injury.
Visit Survivor Science →
The wider picture
Architecture, engineering, the trades, and the rebuild. My personal home base connects the work here to the rest of the story.
Explore the broader story →
Agent setup & management
I set up and manage AI assistants that help you and your team get work done. Grokbot, OpenClaw, Hermes, Buzz, Muse, Amp. That list changes weekly. I can work with the tools you already use or help you choose and get set up. You don’t need to know where to start.
Start a conversation →I learn by building. Often, by the time a practice has a popular name, it is already part of how I work. TypeScript, React, and Next.js lead. WordPress is depth. Frontend is still the foundation. These are the systems and disciplines I bring around it.
01 / The foundation
The interface is where the whole system meets a person. Design judgment, interaction, accessibility, and the details that make a product feel right.
Start with the person and the task. Shape the interface, build it, then check the experience in the browser across screen sizes and input methods.
02 / How I build
AI is part of my everyday development process. I direct the work, make the design and architecture decisions, review the changes, and own what ships.
Give the agent useful context and a bounded task. Inspect the output, test the behavior, refine the result, and keep a person responsible for the release.
03 / The agent bench
Grokbot, OpenClaw, Hermes, and Buzz are part of the tools I work with. I explore how agents fit into useful workflows and where human involvement matters.
Start with the work that needs doing. Choose the tools around it, make the handoffs explicit, and keep the result open to human review and refinement.
04 / Around the model
Context, tools, memory, permissions, and feedback loops. The surrounding system matters as much as the model when agents need to do useful work.
Define the task boundary, available tools, and review checkpoints. Use feedback from real runs to improve the instructions and the system around the agent.
05 / Agent continuity
I build the context around agents: instructions, working knowledge, memory, and the information a task actually needs. The system should help an agent pick up the work with its bearings intact.
Decide what belongs in persistent memory, what is specific to the current task, and what needs to be refreshed. Structure the handoff so the next run can recover the decisions and constraints that matter.
06 / Building together
People and agents working from shared context. Clear ownership and useful handoffs make the work easier to follow, review, and build on together.
Make it clear who owns the next decision, what has changed, and what is ready for review. Team tooling should help people participate in the work.
07 / Useful context
Retrieval-augmented generation: bringing relevant information into the model’s context. I understand the connection between the source material, retrieval, and the answer.
Start with the information people need to use. Consider how it is found, what reaches the model, and how someone can check the resulting answer against its sources.
08 / Below the interface
My frontend foundation now extends through the stack. I work with the data, APIs, and backend behavior that make the experience hold together.
Connect the interface to the data it needs. Think through how information is stored, accessed, updated, and handled when something goes wrong.
09 / Through the finish
I have been the engineering manager, delivery lead, and person in the code. I can help shape the product, bring people together, and carry the work through launch.
Understand the problem and the people affected. Set priorities, surface the tradeoffs, and keep responsibility for the work as it moves from an idea into production.
10 / Platforms & integration
Enterprise WordPress, native blocks, custom plugins, and connections to other systems. My work includes a plugin bridge that brings approved media from a separate application into WordPress.
Make the editing experience usable and the integration maintainable. Keep the direction of data flow, access rules, and import behavior explicit so the systems can work together reliably.
11 / From upload to publishing
Pelican brings together client uploads, team review, image optimization, and a WordPress media bridge. That includes format conversion, metadata removal, and generating useful image variants.
Carry a file through its actual lifecycle: intake, review, processing, storage, and publishing. Pelican’s implementation combines browser-side conversion and metadata removal with server-side optimization and crop generation.
12 / Access by design
Sign-in, private storage, and rules around who can see or change data. My application work includes Supabase authentication, Postgres row-level security, and signed file URLs.
Connect the user-facing sign-in experience to server-side access checks and database policies. Keep private assets private and make each operation follow the caller’s permissions.
13 / Modernization tooling
I am developing tooling that translates page-builder layouts into native WordPress blocks. It involves parsing structured content, normalizing a layout tree, and serializing block markup.
Preserve the meaning of the content as its representation changes. The current work is experimental, with explicit warnings and fallbacks for content the converter cannot safely translate.
14 / Know what exists
FITFO gathers domain, DNS, hosting, email, and website signals into an onboarding brief. I turn technical findings into useful questions, access needs, and next steps for the team.
Work from observable evidence and show the limits of each finding. A useful discovery report makes uncertainty and missing access visible before a handoff or rebuild.
15 / Agents in operation
I work beyond the chat window, including deploying and configuring agent runtimes. My Hermes work includes Railway deployment, runtime configuration, and an admin interface.
Connect the model provider, the runtime, and the channels people use. Keep configuration persistent and make the running system understandable through status, logs, and operational controls.
16 / When production needs you
My WordPress work includes incident response, malware remediation, compromised-account cleanup, and environment hardening across production systems.
Understand what is affected, prioritize the response, and carry the work through remediation and hardening. Production ownership includes what happens when a system needs experienced hands.
Who I Am
TypeScript, React, and Next.js lead how I build. WordPress is depth I still use at scale. The interface, the interaction, and the person using it are still where I start. I care about the systems underneath just as much.
I have been an engineering manager, delivery lead, agency founder, and the person doing the build. I can help shape the product, understand the people involved, and keep the work moving through delivery.
I build AI systems that ship. I direct agents, make the architecture calls, review the work, and own the result. AI should amplify people, not replace judgment. If your team expects development to be primarily manual coding, we are unlikely to be a fit.
Remote only. Three kids and a wife. That's the whole why. Everything else is just how. Build something they can stand on, build something that holds.
The Arc
University of Miami, School of Architecture. A five-year professional program I finished in four and a half. Years of critiques taught me how to take hard feedback, iterate in public, and pull a room together around a single idea. That's where I learned to lead. Real estate in Jersey after that, then Zubillaga Design back in Florida. High-end residential and commercial work across Florida, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Certificates at Miami Dade. Founded and ran a boutique WordPress agency. Learned how to ship client work, manage delivery, and build systems from zero. Agency life taught me how to deploy under real constraints before I ever touched enterprise scale.
Led 100+ engineers across time zones for Fortune 500 clients. Built the systems, processes, and culture that let teams ship reliably at scale. 96% retention. 15 promotions. The machine ran and kept running after I left.
Now I'm back. You can try to knock me down, but you're going to have to hit harder because I keep surviving.
Founded Survivor Science in 2022, a survivor-focused recovery community. 50+ members, stroke and chronic illness survivors, building back together. Multi-channel content, podcast collaborations, peer support. The rebuild does not end. You just start bringing other people with you.
Plumbing apprentice through NEFBA, working toward a master license. Same systems thinking from architecture school, now applied to physical infrastructure. When I deploy something, it has to work in the real world, not just in theory.
Running digital operations for a trades marketing agency and building Lovable Gazelle on the side. Gazelle is AI transformations for the trades. Foundation first, not tools slapped on chaos. I also build tools like FITFO, which gathers the missing pieces of a client website handoff before the first call.
Twenty years in. Still building. The next chapter is wide open.
Firm, collaborative, transparent. I lead with people, not above them. Anti-top-down, anti-bureaucratic.
Make something people can use. Learn from what happens when they do. Keep improving it.
Curious and evolving. Confident enough to change my mind the second someone has a better idea.
Fluent in both dev and client. Spent twenty years in the middle, turning requirements into code and code into answers. That's the job.
The opposite of how most shops run. Tell clients the hard thing before the bill goes sideways. Set expectations you can beat, then beat them.
Real check-ins, clear updates, no dodging. If something breaks, you should know who is handling it and what happens next.
Always thinking, always exploring, always questioning, always building.
Architecture school taught me to see how the pieces fit. Agency work taught me what happens when they don’t. Seven years at WebDevStudios gave me the chance to lead teams and build for clients like Microsoft and the NBA. I still use that experience every day, even when the business is a plumbing shop with a handful of trucks.
I build with AI every single day. I can also tell you why a layout is broken before dev tools open. That combination is the whole pitch. The tools help me get more done, but I’m still responsible for the decisions, the details, and what reaches the client.
I am always building, and I want to join a team that keeps pushing what is possible. Frontend is my foundation; full-stack work and AI have expanded what I can take on. Bring a clear goal, people ready to make decisions, and room to experiment. I want to help shape what comes next and get it into people’s hands.
What it's all for
Three kids and a wife in Jacksonville. That's the whole why. The work. The rebuild. The relentless. Everything else is just how. Build something they can stand on. Build something that holds.
Twenty years, the last 18 fully remote. One pattern: build the platform, understand the operation, keep responsibility through launch.
Plumber Marketing Firm, Charlotte, NC (Remote)
Lovable Gazelle, Jacksonville, FL (Remote)
WebDevStudios, Jacksonville, FL (Remote)
Metro Jacksonville
Ox Nest Studios, LLC
Think Dynasty LLC, Williamsburg, VA
Smellycat Productions, Williamsburg, VA
Zubillaga Design, Florida
Foxtons North America, New Jersey
Ambitious teams, agencies, and clients who know where they want to go and are ready to build toward it. I like complex problems, direct collaboration, and enough trust to help shape the approach.
Interfaces, interaction, APIs, data, product delivery
Build an experience people want to use and the systems that make it work. Frontend judgment, backend discipline, and AI-assisted development from the first idea through a working product.
People, decisions, priorities, delivery ownership
Work alongside the team to understand the problem, shape what gets built, and carry it through delivery. I can move between the technical detail and the people who need to make it happen.
Agent workflows, orchestration, quality gates
AI inside real delivery, not a demo reel. Scoped agent workflows with review checkpoints and test handoffs, built so the output is something you'd actually ship to a client.
Active in the WordPress community since 2008. Regular WordCamp attendee. Shipping real work on WordPress, cleaning up other people's WordPress, and teaching other developers how to do both.
Founded and lead Survivor Science, a 50+ member community for stroke and chronic illness survivors. Multi-channel content, podcast collaborations, peer support. From "Good Enough" to "Unstoppable AF". Navigating recovery together since 2022.
Coached 35+ technical professionals into effective project leaders and managers through structured coaching programs. 100% retention, 5 senior role promotions.
University of Miami
2001 to 2005
Five-year professional program, finished in four and a half.
Southern New Hampshire University
Expected May 2027
Concentration in management and operations.
Employed. Looking for a remote full-time seat with teams pushing what's possible. Room for 2-3 side projects. Bring a clear goal, real context, and the authority to move. I work best with people using AI thoughtfully and ready to build better ways of working.
We’ll work well together if
LinkedIn has the career history. BuiltWTF has the field notes. Email is fastest.
Jacksonville / St. Augustine, FL (Remote only)
Employed. Actively looking for a remote full-time seat with the right team. Open to 2-3 side projects.