About Dan Mercede

Operating background

From 2021 to 2025 I was General Manager at 24 Hour Fitness in Escondido, California, with full P&L ownership of a business doing more than $3M a year and a team of about 20. I built the KPI dashboards and CRM automation the club ran on, and it finished above target four years in a row. I received Sales and GM of the Year awards in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Before that I spent fifteen years in sales and financial operations: representing Apple as a field sales rep with Mosaic Sales Solutions, quota-carrying field sales at Diageo, and financial reporting and analysis at Nestlé USA. I hold a B.A. in Economics from Queen's University.

What I build now

Running a business showed me where automation breaks: nobody owns the workflow, so nobody notices when it drifts. I started building AI systems around that problem while still running the club, and have done it full time since 2025.

I operate a private AI control plane (a decision kernel, an immutable receipt store, policy evaluation, and tracing) that has run continuously for months on a self-managed multi-node cluster. The reusable parts ship as open-source tools, including failclosed (merge admission for AI-written code), schemafit (structured-output schema linting, on PyPI), and mcp-context-budget (MCP tool-surface budget checks, on PyPI).

From April to July 2026 I also worked as a contract architect on shared AI infrastructure for a multi-venture AI studio.

How I work

Operating responsibility taught me to measure what a system does, not what it promises. So I build the first version fast, put checks where a mistake would cost real money or trust, and hand the workflow to the people who run it.

Recognition and speaking

• Speaker, NODES 2026 by Neo4j (November 12, 2026): Don't Flatten the Tree: Ingesting Branched Conversations into a Knowledge Graph
• Finalist, UiPath AgentHack 2026 (Track 3, UiPath Test Cloud), for Proctor