What do ancient Greek texts, orchestral music, and software engineering have in common? For Aaron Kraft, quite a lot.
Before leading the engineering vision behind Tinubu Surety for Carriers (TSC) and Tinubu Surety for Brokers & Agents (TSBA), Kraft was decoding 2,000-year-old manuscripts using code he wrote himself—and studying to be a professional tuba player. With a background that blends linguistics, music, and technology, he brings a distinct perspective to the world of Surety.
“Software engineering is full of patterns, just like music theory or ancient languages,” he says. “There’s a surprising amount of overlap.”
Now VP of Engineering at Tinubu, Kraft oversees not only product development and platform evolution, but also internal IT and cybersecurity. But at its core, he says, “most of my job is making sure we build the right products for our customers.” In his first year, he’s focused on listening—sitting down with Surety customers to understand their challenges and ensuring that feedback directly shapes product priorities.
With experience spanning healthcare, government, media, and insurance, Kraft has spent the past 15 years building complex, cloud-based systems. And while Surety is new territory for him, translating complexity into user-focused solutions is not.
When we sat down with him, we talked about the evolution of Tinubu’s platform—and how playing “My Old Kentucky Home” on a Derby Day eventually led to building the future of Surety tech.
Where are you based?
I’m in Orlando. There’s a lot of blue sky and outdoor activities. I’m in central Florida, so it’s 45 minutes to one coast, or an hour and a half to the other. We can be in the swamps or we can be in the ocean, so it’s very conducive to an active lifestyle.
Where were you before Tinubu?
I was CTO at a healthcare company doing AI/ML [artificial intelligence and machine learning] work around data analysis, hospitalization and remissions, trying to improve healthcare outcomes. When they sold last year, I had the opportunity to come over to Tinubu, which was great. I’ve been in insurance and health insurance; I’ve also worked in government and large media. I’ve been building complex systems, particularly in the last 15 years, with the rise of cloud computing. Surety is new for me, but there are a lot of transferable principles from my other experiences. I’ve been listening to Surety customers, understanding what they need and want, and prioritizing platform upgrades accordingly.
Have you always been an engineering guy?
I’ve always been in technology, though I come at it from a fairly eclectic background, having studied linguistics and music.
Has that background influenced your work today, since technology involves its own kind of language?
Yes. Software engineering is fascinating when viewed through both human and computer language lenses. There’s a lot of crossover. I studied Classics—mainly Greek and Latin, along with some biblical languages—and I’m intrigued by the patterns you find there. They're similar to the ones we use in technology to process inputs, much like the analytical approach used when comparing ancient texts.
Back in graduate school, I wrote code to analyze ancient documents by comparing different language groups. I used optical character recognition to identify the letters, then processed the data to find linguistic patterns. It helped build a clearer picture of these 2,000-year-old texts. It was a great way to combine my passion for linguistics and technology.
You must be one of the few VPs of Engineering who went to music school…
I actually find there is a lot of crossover between people who are in music and STEM, particularly math. When I was in music school back in the ’90s, there were a number of tech students taking music theory classes because they found it interesting to look for the patterns in music.
Where did you go to school?
I was studying to be a professional tuba player at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, so I got to play at the Kentucky Derby on numerous occasions.
Presumably, those weren’t classical performances.
No, we’d go out and play “My Old Kentucky Home” before they did the bugle call to call the horses onto the race course. I was studying classical music, but I also played in the pep band, so I went with the university basketball team to March Madness Final Four games.
But I realized that professional tuba jobs are hard to come by, and that even when you get them, they don’t pay very much. So I started working for the university computer labs and began writing software. Then about 15 years ago, I began to make the pivot towards technical leadership, with less hands-on coding and more focus on where technology is going and making sure we have a 12-month plan, but also a three- to five-year vision.
Speaking of that vision, how do you see Tinubu’s future, and Surety in general?
Surety is very interesting. There are fewer and larger customers than in some other sections of insurance. Tinubu does have a few competitors, but they tend to struggle with activations on a large enterprise scale. Our biggest competitor right now is homegrown systems, built in years past by carriers that could afford to take on that kind of task. I do find, though, as in most industries, companies build a system internally and then get to a point where they realize it's very costly and time-consuming to maintain. A lot of customers will find somebody who’s got vision and build something internally, but three years later they realize they don’t want to pay to maintain and upgrade that system every year, which is necessary. Then, they look for a company like Tinubu with a ready-made platform they can use. When a carrier tries to maintain their own engineering organization of 15, 20, or 30 people, that’s a large long-term cost commitment.
Tinubu has deep roots in the Surety space, and we’re now building on that experience with innovative new technology and cloud computing. Rather than relying on a single, static system, we’ve embraced a flexible, distributed architecture that can scale dynamically—both vertically and horizontally—based on each customer’s specific needs. That means whether a customer is growing rapidly, entering new markets, or simply looking to streamline operations, our platform can evolve with them. The combination of deep industry knowledge and modern, scalable solutions will allow us to deliver real value. We’re getting real traction on this front, which is exciting.
