# Julio M Cruz

Senior Software Engineer · Cloud, AI, secure systems · Virginia, US

You are looking at 25 years of software that works: six under a Top Secret clearance at the U.S. Small Business Administration and the U.S. Department of State, enterprise before that, and AI infrastructure I built and operate today.

- Resume (PDF): https://www.juliomcruz.xyz/JulioMCruz-Resume.pdf
- Email: julio.cruz@eb-ms.net
- GitHub: https://github.com/JulioMCruz
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliomcruz/
- X: https://x.com/JulioMCruz

## Now

I founded PerkOS to bring AI teams to small businesses at prices they can afford: a workspace where a business hires AI teammates in one click, running on infrastructure I designed, built, and operate. I founded zkNexus. Both are active.

Most of what I build is open: 165 own public repositories, three agent runtimes packaged as container images, and systems that run in government, enterprise, and onchain environments.

| Figure | What it measures |
|---|---|
| 25+ | years shipping production software |
| 6 | years TS-cleared, SBA and State |
| 165 | own public repositories on GitHub |
| 3 | agent runtimes in production |

## The arc

- **September 2025 to now · Building PerkOS full time.** Left the clearance job to build AI-agent infrastructure full time: Next.js and TypeScript product surfaces, an OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway, provisioning on AWS ECS Fargate, Stripe and onchain billing. Product decisions, code, and operations, end to end.
- **2019 to 2025 · Washington DC · Top Secret clearance.** Senior software engineer for the U.S. federal government. The Small Business Administration from 2019 to 2021, then the Department of State from 2021 to 2025: C#, .NET, Azure, and identity work with OKTA, Azure AD and OAuth. Systems where a mistake is expensive.
- **2021 to 2025 · Nights and weekends · Onchain, in parallel.** 165 public repositories built alongside the clearance job. Solidity, TypeScript, payment rails. A blockchain credential from MIT Professional Education.
- **2008 to 2019 · Virginia · Enterprise systems.** Six years on corporate infrastructure at JACER. Five as lead developer at Contensive, on e-commerce and mission-critical systems, owning requirements through post-production support.
- **2001 to 2005 · Lima, Peru · Where it started.** Analyst programmer at the National Office of Electoral Processes, database engineer at the Ministry of Economy and Finance, software architect at AVATAR.

## April 2020: the week that decided what I would build for

I was a contractor engineer inside the Small Business Administration when the Paycheck Protection Program launched: forgivable loans that decided whether a restaurant, a shop, or a two-person agency survived the year. The systems were not built for it.

- Apr 3: Paycheck Protection Program opens. A nation of small businesses arrives at once.
- Apr 6: E-Tran, the loan portal, goes down. Unreachable for up to four hours.
- Apr 8: A new entry point into the loan system ships. Built with AWS.
- Apr 8: 381,000 loans · $100 billion · 3,600 lenders, by that afternoon.
- Apr 16: Funding exhausted. More than one million small businesses approved.

The SBA normally backs about $25 billion a year in 7(a) loans. PPP asked the same infrastructure to move that in days, roughly fifty times normal capacity. At that volume the hard part is never the feature. It is consistency under load, recovery you can trust, and designing for the failure rather than the demo, because a partial write is somebody's payroll.

Timeline corroborated by contemporaneous reporting, including American Banker, "After opening-day fiasco, SBA upgrades lender portal with Amazon assist."

## The record: 37 hackathon awards since 2022, twelve first places

Working prototypes under 48-hour deadlines: AI agents, payments, identity. A prize at each of the three in-person ETHGlobal hackathons in 2026 so far.

- Jul 2026 · ETHGlobal Lisbon · EQLTY · The Graph, Best AI Use Case, 1st
- Jun 2026 · ETHGlobal New York · Stream Vaults · Uniswap Foundation 2nd, Ledger AI Agents 4th
- Apr 2026 · ETHGlobal Cannes · Flow Broker · Uniswap Foundation 3rd, Chainlink CRE
- Feb 2026 · ETHDenver · SWARM · 1st, On-chain automation with Hedera
- Feb 2026 · HackMoney · UniPerk · ENS prize pool
- Jul 2025 · ETHGlobal Cannes · PolyBet · Finalist
- Jun 2025 · ETHGlobal Prague · Kairos · Flare main track, 1st
- May 2025 · Base Batches LatAm · AI ART3 HUB · Winner
- Mar 2025 · ETHSF · My Moments · Base, 3rd
- Feb 2025 · Agentic Ethereum · Infinity · Coinbase AgentKit
- Oct 2024 · Base Around The World LatAm · CrediTalent · Winner
- Oct 2024 · ETHGlobal San Francisco · Aurum · Chronicle, 1st

Full record: https://github.com/JulioMCruz

## Selected work

- GitHub: https://github.com/JulioMCruz (165 own repos)
- PerkOS: https://perkos.xyz (AI agent teams I build and operate)
- x402 facilitator: https://stack.perkos.xyz/api/v2/x402/supported (live payment endpoint on Base)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliomcruz/ (full role-by-role history)
- Telegram: https://t.me/JulioMCruz

## Buy me a coffee

If this work helped you, you can buy me a coffee in USDC over x402 (one signature, no gas, 2% to the facilitator): https://buyacoffee.perkos.xyz/pay?to=0xc2564e41b7f5cb66d2d99466450cfebce9e8228f&name=Julio%20M%20Cruz. Agents can read the creator profile at https://buyacoffee.perkos.xyz/api/creators/juliomcruz.

## Contact

When your team needs someone who ships software that works, write me: julio.cruz@eb-ms.net. Agents can use `POST https://www.juliomcruz.xyz/contact` (see /openapi.json and /.well-known/agent-skills/index.json).