About
Software generalist with 13+ years building high-performance distributed systems, data pipelines, and platforms across industries.
Currently an Engineering Lead at Freewheel (Comcast), leading a team that manages an identity graph platform end-to-end — ingesting third-party graphs (TransUnion, LiveRamp), onboarding first-party IDs for graph expansion, and orchestrating graph generation and export pipelines via Airflow.
My career has spanned ecommerce, hardware IoT wearables, flight search in the private charter industry, ad-tech, and now identity resolution infrastructure.
Along the way: I have led teams, architected distributed systems at scale, and developed a habit of finding ways to make things faster and cheaper. I tend to ask a lot of probing questions and challenge assumptions or the “lay of the land.” Not to be difficult - but to stress-test ideas and build a complete mental model. I’ve gotten better at calibrating when to push and when to listen.
I have a large breadth of experience in backend services, infrastructure, dev ops, project execution / dependency management and frontend work - wherever the work is needed I am often eager to assist. Years of philosophy trained me to draw clean boundaries between concepts, a skill that translates well to software design. Untangling legacy systems and building new ones that are actually pleasant to extend is something I’m good at.
What I Do
Working at all scales
I’ve worked on large-scale identity graph systems — led a team managing graph ingestion and generation pipelines on Databricks/Spark, built ad-share services doing 10M+ daily requests, wrote distributed graph computation in Go.
I’ve also shipped “just enough” prototypes - as simple as possible, but no simpler. I enjoy the iterative process of evolving software naturally as it grows.
As a data plumber
- Kafka and Kinesis/Lambda/Redshift pipelines for event-driven workloads
- Real-time analytics and telemetry passthrough
- Batch ETL for warehouse integrations and EDI processing
- Identity resolution pipelines connecting disparate data sources
Integrating systems
- SAP, EDI, payment providers, ecommerce platforms, warehouse systems
- Custom APIs bridging mobile apps, VoIP systems, and enterprise workflows
Reducing cost & improving efficiency
- Infrastructure optimization — right-sizing, reserved instances, service consolidation — that eliminated $1.5M/year in cloud spend at Fubo
- 15% AWS reduction at Motiv through infrastructure consolidation
- Clean architecture that pays off in reduced maintenance and faster iteration
- Finding the “boring” solution that’s 80% as good at 20% of the complexity
As a leader
I’m better in small rooms than big ones - 1:1 mentorship, architecture whiteboarding, direct feedback. I tend to surface problems early, which isn’t always comfortable but usually saves time. I push back because I care about getting it right - and I’ve learned to deliver that with more tact over time.
My first real leadership experience was as founding engineer at a telemedicine startup — first hire, selected the stack, built a HIPAA-compliant platform from scratch, and grew the team to 5 engineers. That experience shaped how I think about building teams and systems from zero. Since then I’ve mentored engineers at every stop, from junior developers through senior ICs.
I think long-term about systems and tend to have strong opinions about where things should go. That vision doesn’t always align with immediate business needs, and I’ve learned to be flexible about the path as long as we’re pointed in a good direction. I can navigate short-term requirements while keeping an eye on where we’re actually trying to get.
I motivate by staying motivated - if I’m excited about the work and in the trenches with you, that tends to be contagious.
Tech
Languages: Go (gRPC, Gin, Echo), TypeScript/Node, PHP, Ruby, Bash, Rust (learning); working proficiency in Python and Scala
Frontend: React, Next.js, Angular, Tailwind
Data: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Aerospike, BigQuery, Redshift, Kafka, SQS, Protobuf
Infrastructure: Linux (15+ years), Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Terraform, Ansible, Airflow, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus
Domains: Ad-tech, data pipelines, ecommerce, IoT, identity resolution, high-performance distributed systems, combinatorial optimization
Outside of Work
I code for fun - side projects, game mods, tools for games I play, algorithmic trading experiments. If I’m not building something, I’m probably reading about science, space, or robotics. I like understanding how things work at a fundamental level.
I lift heavy and try to stay active - gym sessions, rock climbing, hiking. Balance for all the screen time.
Gaming is the main way I unwind. I tend to end up writing code for the games I play - optimizers, bots, mods. The line between hobby and side project gets blurry.
I share my apartment with an elderly cat who has strong opinions about my schedule.
The Road Taken
I grew up on the early internet - mIRC, making websites, messing around with Terragen 3D and pirated copies of Photoshop 6 back when things were still crackable. Then I drifted away from computers in my teens.
I went to school thinking I’d become a psychologist. Worked in a neuroscience lab, studied how brains process information. Somewhere along the way I rediscovered programming - Conway’s Game of Life fascinated me, complex behavior from simple rules. The neuroscience background has shaped how I intuitively understand systems and computation.
The Great Recession hit while I was in school and I was unsure about the psych path, so I bought time by adding a philosophy major - ethics and classical specifically. I enjoyed thinking about the nature of things, drawing boundaries between concepts, questioning assumptions. Turns out that translates well to software - breaking down problems, designing clean abstractions, understanding systems at a fundamental level. The CS minor happened in parallel, and that’s what stuck.