I partner with business and product leaders to manifest great ideas in software, coaching engineering teams to build class-defining products of social and economic value that are reliable, scalable, and fit to purpose.
Employment History
Director of Software Engineering, UrbanFootprint, 2022-09-19 — 2023-09-30
led full stack engineering teams to deliver B2C, B2B, and internal software products
- coached software teams to expand business impact by improving code, design, collaboration, and planning skills
- designed systems, architectures, projects, and SDLC to align development with enterprise/product strategy
- created leveling frameworks, staffing plans, and career development protocols to evaluate and expand talent
- solicited and evaluated engineering proposals for cost and business impact to optimize sequencing and efficiency
- expanded opportunities for collaboration, especially with data science/AI team, to effectively leverage talent
- reviewed Typescript, Python, Go, Terraform code, assuming final ownership for quality, design, and operations
- formulated company and team goals with metrics and feedback loops to align cross-functional delivery
- provided strategic guidance to leadership, influencing product, finance, customer success, and company culture
- contributed to SOC-II compliance, designing systems and architectures to meet customer data privacy expectations
Staff Software Engineer (Cloud), UrbanFootprint, 2022-07-01 — 2022-09-18
automated multi-cloud infrastructure in AWS and GCP using Terraform and Go
- authored engineering proposals advocating for SRE practices to improve reliability and efficiency
- improved Git operations by standardizing branching strategies, reducing developer overhead and toil
- developed and improved CI/CD processes to accelerate delivery and reduce toil (GitHub Actions & Jenkins)
- led migration of self-hosted AirFlow DAGs to GCP Cloud Composer, improving operational agility and reducing costs
- wrote Go tool to automate blue/green deploys with Cloud Run and Terraform Cloud to improve delivery confidence
- created, maintained, and managed IaC assets in Terraform for version-controlled, repeatable infrastructure ops
- improved multi-cloud ops (AWS/GCP), reducing overhead by standardizing tooling and planning for consolidation
aligned and streamlined technology operations to support PLOS's business and cultural objectives with world-class software and systems
- directed a team of 25 and multi-million dollar budget, unifying enterprise technology operations for the first time
- coached managers and engineers to expand business impact by improving technical, collaboration, and planning skills
- completed cloud migration, eliminating data center and reducing overhead, delivering 50%+ annual savings
- streamlined operations for 25% leaner teams to focus on business logic and innovation while maintaining continuity
- evaluated build/buy/partner decisions and negotiated contracts, further reducing overhead and expenses
- balanced feature development with internal/technical initiatives to continuously deliver stakeholder value
- formulated company and team goals with metrics and feedback loops to align cross-functional delivery
- created strategic staffing, training, and execution plans to identify capability gaps and revitalize teams
- designed systems, architectures, projects, and SDLC to align development with enterprise/product strategy
- popularized distributed work policies and practices with other teams to improve enterprise pandemic continuity
consolidated disparate DevOps and software teams under common leadership and matrixed agile squads, initiated a comprehensive cloud migration
- refined requirements, compiled estimates, and coordinated priorities with product managers to build great features
- mentored engineers via code reviews, Git insights, and constructive feedback to expand business impact
- guided team through business model and staffing transformations, maintaining continuity and productivity
- transformed team morale and productivity by providing a framework for defining values and engineering practices
- coached squads through process optimizations and transformational projects for faster, more efficient delivery
- proposed and designed "move-and-improve" cloud migration to GCP/GKE to reduce overhead and costs
- prototyped Kubernetes manifests, Terraform states, GitLab CI/CD pipelines to demonstrate feasibility of migration
- led "unconference" of hackathons, demos, workshops to validate cloud strategy and align engineering team
- persuaded leadership to adopt cloud migration proposal by quantifying savings and planning for continuity
- expanded and improved distributed workforce policies and practices to ensure continuity during COVID pandemic
served as chief architect for configuration management, infrastructure automation, and developer tools, accountable for global operations reliability
- aligned development and operations by coordinating cadences, release schedules, and sharing between teams
- introduced Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices to optimize reliability and reduce toil
- led standardization and automation efforts across development and operations to improve operational efficiency
- expanded the team's business impact by recruiting, mentoring engineers through code reviews, peering, and training
- experimented with cloud services (AWS, GCP) and IaC tools (CDK, Pulumi, Terraform) to prepare for the future
- quantified and modeled costs of hardware and software platforms to lay groundwork for cloud computing
was hired to bring modern DevOps practices to PLOS's bespoke datacenter environment
- implemented configuration and lifecycle management for bare metal environment using Saltstack and Python
- contributed to modernizing infrastructure to run on Nutanix/VMWare with Hashicorp Consul and Vault
- created tools in Python and Go for automating infrastructure, managing environments, and integrating with CI/CD
- advocated for adoption of DevOps practices, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and cloud computing
- planned and executed deployments of complex distributed systems and highly available applications
- integrated observability and telemetry tools (Prometheus, Kibana, NewRelic, PagerDuty, etc.)
functioned as chief architect for DevOps and infrastructure tools and manager of the DevOps team, with responsibility for the global delivery and architecture of rapidly-growing BuildingOS platform
- collaborated with executives and engineers to operate, scale, and develop features for high volume data product
- shaped corporate culture by influencing senior management to codify cultural norms and management practices
- recruited, hired, and mentored engineers and admins to expand DevOps team and practices
- contributed to migration planning and transition from MySQL to Cassandra for high volume time-series data
managed gnu/linux and windows systems for Open Source Applications Foundation, Level Playing Field Institute, Mozilla, and other Kapor associated nonprofits
- managed development infrastructure and tools for team of 30 OSAF engineers
- administered IT and network services for staff of 65
- built and designed email, inventory management, and other systems
Volunteer Activities
Director Emeritus, IO Coöperative, 2015-12 — None
advise active board members on technology, policy, and governance matters
Co-Founder, Board Chair & Secretary, IO Coöperative, 2012-08 — 2015-12
co-founded, bootstrapped, and led a consumer technology coöperative
- motivated community leaders and members to formalize activities as a corporation
- led business strategy, startup, and incorporation activities
- chaired board meetings, managed business agenda, kept corporate records, prepared annual reports
- engaged legal counsel to successfully avoid baseless DMCA-related lawsuit