Evomedia.net

The natural evolution of your business.

Work

The natural evolution of your business.

Employment and highlights — Kelly Michels, with ongoing focus on software design and UI design alongside QA and delivery.

Employment

Principal Software QA Engineer / Senior QA Engineer — Autodesk (2006–2026)

Impact & recognition highlights

  • Supported thousands of beta users across continuous two-week sprint release cycles, ensuring stability, feedback integration, and production readiness.
  • Core QA contributor for Autodesk AI MotionMaker and ML Toolkit from initial development through production release of AI-driven animation workflows.
  • Supported executive demo readiness for Autodesk AI MotionMaker showcased at TechX 2025, presented by Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost.
  • Contributed to Autodesk AI MotionMaker earning the Customer Experience Award at TechX 2026 through end-to-end QA validation and release stability.
  • Led QA strategy and execution for flagship Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max platforms.
  • Built automation and API testing tools using Python, PHP, PowerShell, and AI-assisted workflows (Cursor, GitHub, Copilot).
  • Integrated automated testing into Jenkins CI/CD pipelines with Artifactory artifact management.
  • Authored test plans, regression strategies, and validation matrices.
  • Extensive experience working in an Agile, highly collaborative, team-based environment, partnering with engineering, product, UX, and release teams across continuous two-week sprint cycles.
  • Corporate-level Centercode Administrator for Autodesk, owning enterprise beta infrastructure and serving as Beta Program Manager for Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya.

Projects

evo.ehs

Industrial EHS permit lifecycle platform for multi-plant manufacturers — tracking obligations, evidence, and compliance workflows.

Open case study

evo-ai

A multi-tenant RAG platform I designed and built — answers grounded only in an organization's own records, with citations. Deployed in production as the "Ask AI" capability inside evo.ehs.

Open case study

EvoCivilCode

Texas statutes Q&A built on evo-ai — every answer cited to a specific section with a link to the official text, answered by a local model. Currently in beta.

Read more

SWAG Estimates

Web-based estimating platform for major industrial capital projects, converted from an 18-sheet Excel methodology refined over 30 years of in-field use.

Open case study

EvoPlatform

The multi-tenant foundation beneath these apps — shared authentication, row-level data isolation, and a common SDK. Internal platform, currently proving out against SWAG Estimates and DocketMail.

Read more

DocketMail

Automated court-record monitoring for Southeast Texas — surfaces new filings and generates targeted direct-mail pieces from the data, on a schedule.

Read more

zscripts

Open-source PowerShell CLI that collapses the start/deploy/backup chores of a multi-project AWS stack into one-word commands, built for AI-assisted development.

Open case study

evo.locate

Open-source self-hosted IP geolocation API — no key, no per-query cost, and no visitor IP leaves the machine. A drop-in replacement for ip2location.io's free tier.

Source on GitHub ↗

Self-hosted platform

Everything on this site runs on infrastructure I designed, built, and operate end-to-end — a single nginx edge, containerized services, self-hosted email and Git, and full metrics and dashboards, on one AWS box with no managed PaaS.

Open case study

QA Engineering for AI Systems

Principal QA / SDET practice applied to a production LLM platform I designed and built — a documented defect loop against text-to-SQL, retrieval, and guardrail failure modes.

Open case study