Speaker & Author

Erik
Anderson

Principal Network Automation Engineer. Author. Veteran. Former hacker turned builder. I help engineers and organizations transition from manual operations to AI-driven autonomous systems.

Erik Anderson headshot
Erik Anderson
Veteran Engineer Author Speaker
Bio

Erik Anderson is a Principal Network Automation Engineer with 15+ years building automation systems for telecommunications and satellite networks. He spent years at Intelsat building tools that manage hundreds of devices across a global satellite fleet, competing directly with Starlink.

He is a US Army veteran, a Western Governors University graduate at 43, and a former hacker who was in 2600 IRC channels before he could drive. He is the author of two books: From McDonalds to Financial Freedom and The Autonomous Engineer. He maintains 27 active projects across two servers, including open-source tools used by engineers worldwide.

He is the founder of HumanRail, an AI-to-human task routing platform, and Prime Automation Solutions. He speaks on AI-driven network automation, agentic engineering, and the career transition from executor to architect.

Books

Two books. Two playbooks.

01
From McDonalds to Financial Freedom
A memoir of money, grit, and systems. From high school dropout to 7 income streams. Free PDF + 11 interactive financial tools at erikandersonbook.com.
Amazon →
02
The Autonomous Engineer
How I Used AI to Automate My Network, My Workflow, and My Life. 56,000 words. 13 chapters of real production code. Written in 2 days using AI tools described in the book.
Coming Soon
Speaking Topics

What I talk about.

From Copilot to Claude Code: The Four Phases of AI-Assisted Engineering
How AI coding tools evolved from tab completion to autonomous agents. Real examples of going from weeks of development to hours. Why Zuckerberg told Meta engineers to stop being productive and learn AI tools. What Phase 3 and Phase 4 actually look like in practice.
Building the Autonomous NOC: Network Automation Meets Agentic AI
How I built NSO Reconciliation, Netdrift, and ZTP at a satellite ISP. AI agents that classify tickets, deploy configs in plain English, and detect drift. The architecture of MCP servers that give AI eyes and hands on production infrastructure. Where the industry is headed with TM Forum L0-L5 autonomous networks.
The Ice Delivery Man: Why Your Engineering Job Is Changing Whether You're Ready or Not
The career transition from executor to architect. What happens when CLI mastery and troubleshooting speed become table stakes that AI handles. How to build a promotion portfolio from automation projects. The Zuckerberg signal and what it means for every engineer at every level.
Guardrails Are Not Optional: Keeping Humans in the AI Loop
Why AI shouldn't make every decision alone. HumanRail and the architecture of AI-to-human task routing. Confidence thresholds, blast radius limits, and the verification pipeline. How to deploy AI agents in production without losing sleep. Lightning Network for instant worker payments.
27 Projects, One Engineer: Building a Personal AI Infrastructure
How I maintain 27 active projects across two servers without a team. claude-memory for machine awareness, DevPulse for project tracking, MCP servers for multi-platform AI access. The Tony Stark / Jarvis reality of working with AI as a partner, not just a tool. Building for an audience of one.
Contact

Book Erik for speaking.

Available for conferences, podcasts, workshops, and corporate training on AI-driven automation and the future of network engineering.

Email Erik →

[email protected]

erikandersonbook.com humanrail.dev github.com/prime001 Discord Community
Download Media Kit (PDF) ↓