Joe Lohr

Joe Lohr

Senior Laravel Engineer building compliance software and AI tools for car dealerships

Island Lake, Illinois

I've been building websites and web apps for 15 years. At Automotive Risk Management Partners I'm the only developer on the compliance platform car dealerships use, so I work directly with the people who use it: our compliance consultants, leadership and the dealerships themselves. When someone asks for a feature, I meet with them, plan it and build it, then demo it to the consultants, write the docs and answer the support tickets myself. Before that I spent 11 years at TurnKey Digital on a team of five developers and designers, meeting with prospective and current clients online and in person.

Selected work

Case study

A tenant-scoped AI compliance assistant

Problem
Dealership staff ask compliance questions whose answers depend on their own dealership's records, like "Where are we at with employees completing their courses, and who hasn't finished yet?" A generic chatbot can't see those records, and one that could see everything would leak data between dealerships and roles.
Constraints
Each dealership has its own database through stancl/tenancy. Users sit at one of five role levels, from admin to employee, and should see only what their role allows. I'm the only developer and I answer the support tickets too, so it had to be simple to maintain.
Approach
I gave the model tools to call rather than putting records in the prompt. Each tool runs inside the current tenant and checks the user's permissions before it returns anything, so the model only sees what that user could open in the app.
Tradeoffs
Tools take more work than stuffing context into a prompt, and each new kind of question needs a new tool. In exchange, the access rules live in application code, and the prompt has no say in them.
Result
The assistant answers compliance questions inside the dashboard, and its answers only draw on data the user can already access.

Experience

  1. Automotive Risk Management Partners

    2022 to now

    Laravel Web App Developer

    I build and run the compliance platform for car dealerships and the tools around it. When a dealership asked for a way to track remediation of audit violations, I met with them, planned it and built it, and they use it today.

  2. TurnKey Digital

    2011 to 2022

    WordPress Developer

    Built custom WordPress sites for local businesses on a team of five developers and designers. I met with prospective and current clients online and in person, and shot product and location photos and video for them.

3,047 contributions in 2026

github.com/jlarm

Busiest day: Wednesday, April 22, with 54 contributions