Professional Summary
Ian McCallum is a Naperville, Illinois tech builder, incoming UIUC Gies College of Business student, and founder of Beat the Clock. His experience spans web development, automation, AI workflows, customer-facing work, and creative digital projects.
Objective
Founder and lead engineer of Beat the Clock, where I designed and built Clockwork, an AI operations platform for trades businesses that turns a missed call into a drafted reply, a priced quote, a confirmed appointment, and a collected invoice. I work in Python, prompt engineering, and applied AI systems design, with a bias toward software that refuses to guess when the answer costs somebody money. Incoming Finance and Data Science student at the University of Illinois' Gies College of Business.
Education
Metea Valley High School
Aurora, IL • Graduated Class of 2026
GPA: 4.25
Honors: Illinois State Scholar, Magna Cum Laude, National Honor Society, Soccer Sportsmanship Award
AP Courses: AP Statistics, AP Macroeconomics, AP U.S. Government & Politics, AP Environmental Science, AP European History, AP Psychology, AP U.S. History, AP English 3
Additional Coursework: Virtual Enterprise International (VEI), Honors Biology, Honors Spanish, Honors English
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, IL • Gies College of Business • Expected Class of 2030
Intended Major: Finance & Data Science
Skills
AI systems design
Prompt engineering
LLM integration
Python
JavaScript & React
Product design
Client communication
Self-directed
Autodidactic
Work Experience
Beat the Clock
December 2024 – Present
Founder & Lead Engineer
- Founded the company and built Clockwork, an AI operations platform for trades businesses, as sole architect and engineer: ten automated stages across eight screens, from catching a missed call to planning tomorrow's schedule overnight.
- Designed the product around an approval-gated AI agent: every message is drafted for the owner to approve, and the agent only earns permission to send a message type on its own after enough drafts pass unedited, revocable in one tap.
- Separated deterministic pricing from model output so quotes compute from each customer's own rate card, eliminating a class of AI failure where a hallucinated number costs real money.
- Wrote a ten-rule voice specification for the agent's writing and enforced it in the test suite, failing the build on any violation.
- Engineered for auditability and trust: unreachable-model calls surface as distinct retryable states instead of silent degradation, every outbound message writes a timestamped outbox row with a reason, and opt-outs are enforced at every send path.
- Architected multi-tenant support scaling from a single owner-operator to multi-location businesses, with role-separated access and strict data isolation between locations.
- Built the go-to-market end to end: positioning, site, and a free assessment tool that quantifies the hours a shop is losing each week.
Target
June 2024 – Present
Food Department Team Member
- Delivered excellent customer service in a fast-paced environment.
- Stocked shelves, managed inventory, and maintained department organization.
- Handled multiple customer interactions daily, improving communication and problem-solving skills.
Coldwell Banker Dan Firks
June 2025 – August 2025
Real Estate Runner · Summer Role
- Ran open house setup and property staging for one of the highest-producing real estate teams in the area across a full summer season.
- Coordinated showing logistics on a weekly schedule, handling transport, setup, and breakdown across multiple listings.
Achievements
- 1st Place, National E-Commerce Website, Virtual Enterprise International, for Luminate, a storefront with a built-in arcade that awards promo codes.
- 1st Place, Midwest Regional E-Commerce Website, Virtual Enterprise International
- Illinois State Scholar
- AP Scholar with Distinction Award
- Magna Cum Laude
- Seal of Biliteracy
- Soccer Sportsmanship Award
