About

I follow hard questions into working systems.

I’m Eric Rhea, a principal engineer and technical leader. My work spans financial platforms, applied AI, and public experiments. The common method is simple: build enough to learn, inspect what happened, and use the result to make the next decision better.

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Eric Rhea
Eric Rhea

The work

Make complex systems legible, reliable, and ready to change.

Some questions can be settled in a meeting. The consequential ones usually need a working model, a clear interface, or an experiment that exposes where the assumptions break. I use those artifacts to turn ambiguity into decisions, reduce the places where teams can be surprised, and make standards teachable.

My public record includes a 2023 Helix by Q2 author record naming me as Principal Engineer and an original engineer behind CorePro, an early banking-as-a-service platform that became Helix. My Leadership OS describes the same arc in my own words: founding and principal engineering work on complex financial systems, paired with a responsibility to grow the judgment around those systems.

Selected evidence

Claims should lead somewhere you can inspect.

Embedded finance · Published work

AI and consequential financial systems

A Helix by Q2 article on generative AI in embedded finance, published with my role and author biography.

Read the archive and source note

Leadership · Public briefing

Turning AI pilots into durable capability

A DMACC leadership briefing about decisions, governance, and cross-functional value beyond the first demonstration.

Review the talk summary

Research · Working systems

Experiments with the receipts left in

Public work across agent systems, small-model training, local inference, generated worlds, and software reliability.

Browse research and experiments

How I operate

Clarity is an engineering control.

Over more than a decade, my working record accumulated across decisions, architecture notes, reviews, escalations, and postmortems. When I examined that record for recurring behavior, clarity was the invariant: clear goals, interfaces, ownership, next steps, and standards.

I publish the resulting Leadership OS because operating principles are more useful when other people can inspect, challenge, and apply them.

  • Make the consequential decision explicit.
  • Design interfaces that expose ownership and failure.
  • Prefer evidence and working artifacts to performance.
  • Raise team judgment so leadership scales beyond a bottleneck.

Current practice

A continuing practice across systems and applied AI.

The technology changes, but the practice stays consistent: understand the real problem, build enough to test it, make the important decision clear, and leave the system easier for other people to operate and change.

I also keep returning to engines, literal and otherwise. Apostate Engine 185 turns a fictional gravity machine into a playable scene and CAD archive. Earlier trails include a from-scratch TypeScript game-engine experiment and a four-part Blender aerospace-engine progression.

If you’re working through a difficult technical question or need a practical briefing for your team, start a conversation.