CH Charles Hayes
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Charles Hayes.

Sr. Systems Engineer · AI + ITSM · Charlotte, NC

I point AI at the messy middle of IT.

I'm Charles — Sr. Systems Engineer at LPL Financial, currently moving into production workload operations on the ClientWorks platform. ServiceNow tickets, Jira defects, Confluence pages, Dynatrace and AlertSite telemetry: the stuff nobody wants to read. Over the past year I've spent 1,000+ hours building with AI, and most of it shipped.

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Featured Projects

Neon Nom

A macOS creature-evolution bullet-hell survivor in Swift and SpriteKit, built on a machine with no Xcode — so every texture, every sound, and the app icon are generated in code rather than shipped as assets.

Key Capabilities

  • Zero bundled assets — textures, audio, and app icon all generated at runtime
  • Data-driven content tables: 11 base weapons, 11 evolutions, modules, traits, chests
  • Pooled sprites and a spatial hash instead of a physics engine
  • An autoplay bot that doubles as the regression harness
Swift SpriteKit Swift Package Manager AppKit GLSL
Stock Narrative Explorer screenshot

Stock Narrative Explorer

Interactive equity-narrative tool that generates confidence-tiered, day-by-day AI explanations for stock movements across a configurable watchlist, combining yfinance, Finnhub, SEC EDGAR, and Google News with daily drift detection.

Key Capabilities

  • Daily AI narratives for a configurable watchlist, or any US ticker on demand
  • 4-source ingestion (yfinance, Finnhub, SEC EDGAR, Google News)
  • Confidence-tiered output with structured citations
  • Drift detection re-evaluates stale narratives
Python FastAPI Anthropic API React/Vite Docker Railway
Inside LPL Internal at LPL Financial

RCA Generator

Turns ServiceNow incident data into a standardized deck presented weekly to senior leadership. Hours of assembly, down to seconds.

Observability Intelligence Dashboard

LLM-as-judge critique of incident notes against available telemetry — surfaces trending themes and concrete monitoring gaps.

Performance Impact Analyzer

Quantifies advisor and investor experience degradation during major incidents.

How I work

I instrument before I diagnose.

When something's off, I reach for telemetry before I reach for a guess.

I push past the first cause.

Five-why, not one-why. The interesting answer usually lives a layer deeper.

I use AI as a thinking partner.

Claude Code, structured prompts, repeatable workflows. The speed is in the practice.

I translate up.

Technical incidents into business narratives senior leaders can act on.

Experience

Sep 2025 – Present

Senior Systems Engineer, Production Workload Operations

LPL Financial

  • · Supporting account lifecycle management on LPL's ClientWorks platform — contributing to triage and production support alongside senior partners and SMEs while developing domain expertise across a new set of systems
  • · Built an RCA generator now used across Problem Management — pulls the relevant ServiceNow data into a standardized, LPL-branded deck presented weekly to senior leadership; cut an hours-long manual assembly step to seconds
  • · Built an observability intelligence framework measuring monitoring effectiveness across major incidents — an LLM-as-judge approach critiques incident notes against available telemetry to surface recurring themes and concrete monitoring gaps; its metrics anchor monthly CIO-level platform stability reviews
  • · Built AI-assisted Performance Impact Analyzer (Claude Code, Python, Dynatrace) — replaced 10+ hours/week of manual analysis
  • · Authored agentic AI tool strategy and onboarding playbook adopted across the team
Observability AI Tooling Python ServiceNow Production Support
Oct 2024 – Sep 2025

Senior Systems Engineer, Problem Management

LPL Financial

  • · Directed 320 major problem investigations including 70 Critical/High Priority incidents with advisor, investor, and home office impact
  • · Led LPL's response during the global CrowdStrike outage (Jul 2024), supporting executive communications and stability efforts
  • · Created Five-Why methodology cause maps, improving RCA quality and consistency
  • · Spearheaded a cross-functional stability initiative that secured EPMO funding on demonstrated business impact
  • · Owned and modernized the Problem Management Confluence knowledge base and Jira board — improving visibility, onboarding, and cross-team alignment
  • · University Ambassador at Clemson — led recruiting and interviewing across six career fairs, resulting in intern and early-career hires
  • · ProductTech Monthly Value Award, nominated by the CTIO (Sep 2024) — "Seek, Embrace, and Apply Feedback"
Incident Management RCA Service Improvement Cross-functional Coordination
Jun 2021 – Oct 2024

Systems Engineer I → II, Problem & Change Management

LPL Financial

  • · Systems Engineer II (May 2023 – Oct 2024) — major problem management; expanded ownership of high-severity investigations and cross-team root cause analysis
  • · Systems Engineer I (Jun 2021 – May 2023) — major problem management and infrastructure change management; CAB facilitation and RFC review
Problem Management Change Management CAB Facilitation RCA

Earlier: Technology Intern, Change Management at LPL Financial (2020) · Intern, IT End User Services / Tier 3 Support at TriNet (2019)

Education & Certifications

B.S. Computer Science

Clemson University Honors College

May 2021

Cum Laude · President's List · Head's List · Upsilon Pi Epsilon · General Honors

Certifications

AWS Certified AI Practitioner (in progress) Claude Certified Architect (in progress) Dynatrace Essentials (Mar 2026) McKinsey Leadership Essentials (Mar 2026) McKinsey Team Leadership (Feb 2026) McKinsey Business Leadership (Jan 2026) ITIL®4 Practitioner: Problem Management (Sep 2024) Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt (Jul 2023) ITIL®4 Foundation (Aug 2022) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (Oct 2021, renewed 2024) Agile Foundations (Jun 2021)

Skills

AI & Automation

Claude Code Cursor GitHub Copilot Anthropic API Prompt Engineering Agentic Tool Design NLP-based Incident Analysis LLM-as-Judge Evaluation

Reliability & Operations

Site Reliability Engineering Incident Management Major Problem Management Root Cause Analysis Five-Why Cause Mapping ITIL®4 Production Support Account Lifecycle Management

Change & Enablement

Change Management Cross-functional Coordination Knowledge Base Modernization Mentorship Executive Communications

Observability & Tooling

Dynatrace AlertSite ThousandEyes ELK ServiceNow Jira/Confluence AWS MS365

Analytics & Reporting

Performance Analysis Apdex Metrics Frameworks Data Storytelling Business Impact Translation

I'm always up for a conversation about reliability, AI tooling, or what to learn next.

Open to collaborations and opportunities. Charlotte, NC.

Outside work: about 10K yards a week in the pool, and training for a first sprint triathlon — the bike is new, the swimming isn't. Swam the 2022 Alcatraz Invitational, 1.5 miles to the San Francisco shore, 18th of 423.

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