Background
Corey Mangum has spent more than thirty years designing and building software, most of it the kind other systems depend on: billing and order management, messaging and event infrastructure, and the platforms other teams build on.
Around 2016 the work changed shape. Before then, a specification arrived and the job was working out how to build it. Since then, every architecture has started with the product questions: what problem, for whom, what it changes for the business, and what makes this version different. Those answers shape a system more than any decision made later in the build. That is why the process Tavaci runs spends its effort on requirements before code.
Billing and business systems
The longest thread runs through money and orders. In the early 1990s it was billing and payment tracking for car dealerships that carried their own finance contracts, then accounting and billing software for law firms. Around 2000 came online print ordering and production automation, with B2B orders arriving through procurement marketplaces.
Later work included a mobile point-of-sale system built on an ERP platform, with native integrations for barcode scanners, card readers, receipt printers and cash drawers. The same period brought the restructuring of acquired supply chain software into standalone products.
The most recent work is billing, entitlements and a token ledger for a conversational AI platform. That covers subscriptions, credit ledgers, spend enforced on every agent turn, and the money-correctness guarantees underneath them. Those go down to idempotent replay and proofs against double-spend.
Real-time messaging and events
At a large travel company, Corey led architecture of a unified messaging platform that let the company’s brands design, send and track personalized communications to travelers and partners. He led performance and governance work on the Kafka framework carrying real-time events across the organization, and designed the self-service governance layer six organizations used on top of it.
Before that, at an online learning company, he helped move a monolith to Go microservices and set the standards every service followed for logging, metrics, alerting, events and interfaces. He also designed its transactional and person-to-person communication services.
Conversational and agentic AI
At the travel company, Corey was one of two lead architects on the second generation of its conversation platform, covering the conversation protocol, platform configuration and the real-time message router. The platform carries virtual-agent support for travelers and the people who help them, across the company’s consumer brands and for external partners including the online travel portals of major credit card companies.
More recently, he designed and built the billing and entitlements services for a conversational AI platform whose agents solve complex data problems. Every agent turn passes through them, and when a balance runs out, the turn in progress completes and no new turn starts.
Mobile and offline-first
Earlier, for more than a decade, the work was enterprise mobile. At a mobile platform vendor, Corey led the teams building a client framework that kept applications working with no connectivity and reconciled data when the connection returned, without application developers writing sync code. The same teams built a design tool hosted in Visual Studio for assembling mobile business applications, and he built the first connectors bringing ERP and CRM data to field technicians.
At a mobile retail and supply chain software company, he architected the platform API and the cross-platform application framework. He also led a tablet ordering catalog that let suppliers present upcoming lines to retailers and take orders fully offline.
Standards and review
Much of the work has also been setting standards and reviewing designs. Corey led an architecture guild that reviewed and approved high-level designs across a large engineering organization, represented the organization on the company-wide guild, and served on review panels for new critical services. He has mentored engineers throughout, on the patterns that are expensive to add after the fact.
From colleagues
“What makes him unusual is that his architectural judgment survives contact with production.”
“Corey is hands down one of the sharpest technologists I’ve worked with — brilliant at simplifying complexity, deeply collaborative, and unfailingly humble.”
The name
Tavaci means “sun” in Colorado River Numic, the language spoken by the Ute, Southern Paiute and Chemehuevi Native American peoples. Corey grew up in Salt Lake City and went to the University of Utah, whose teams are the Utes. The name is a nod to those roots.
Core technologies
Go, Python, TypeScript, Java, C#, AWS, Kafka, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, Pulumi and Docker.