Justin Barias

Justin Barias is a Lead Software & AI Engineer currently building experimentation and AIOps platforms for an Australian government department. Before that, he spent 6 years at Microsoft as a Senior Software Engineer, working across distributed systems, data engineering, and early custom Copilot development using Azure OpenAI, LangChain, and Semantic Kernel. His background in platform engineering heavily shaped how he approaches AI engineering. The same principles that make platforms work (consistency, self-service, fast feedback loops) are what he’s been applying to agent development since GPT-3.5 Turbo. He recently built his first open-source tool, HoloDeck, a CLI toolkit for config-driven agent development, testing, and deployment. He writes about the realities of shipping agents at justinbarias.io.