- based
- Austin, TX
- working
- Remote
- years
- 15+
- stack
- Python · React
What makes us human, makes our software.
Engineering leader with 15+ years scaling organizations from early startup to public company. Consistent record of converting technical execution into measured business outcomes: user growth, customer satisfaction, performance, and delivery velocity in close partnership with Product. Leading adoption of AI-native development practices, establishing trust in agentic delivery workflows while eliminating AI-DLC bottlenecks and preserving engineering quality and craft.
Currently, lives in the suburbs of Austin, Texas with his wife, Tina, and 3 kids. In his spare time he enjoys indoctrinating his children into his favorite things like Magic the Gathering, 3D Printing, Jurassic Park (1 only), all the video games, and Dungeon Crawler Carl (this one maybe not yet for the kids).
Career
Director of Engineering · Elastic
Currently leading the Kibana Application Experience group.
Co-founder · Subscription Box Kids
Kid subscription boxes to inspire a love of reading, math, science, and more. Acquired August 2023.
Head of Engineering · New Knowledge
Recruited and grew the engineering organization from 12 to 35+ contributors in under eight months.
3 highlights
- Benchmarked and improved service reliability to 99.9%.
- Established consistent team velocity and a predictable software release cadence.
- Built and managed cross-functional teams in partnership with Product.
Head of Engineering · Cratejoy
Key early leader; scaled the company from 10 to 70 employees over three years and the product from $0 to $10M ARR.
5 highlights
- Held engineering turnover below 10% through that period of growth.
- Set the engineering vision and executed a multi-year strategy to resolve scaling constraints; presented the analysis, execution plan, and budget to the executive team and secured funding for permanent resolution.
- Founded the Site Reliability Engineering team, eliminating customer-facing Sev-1 outages for 24 consecutive months.
- Implemented CI/CD, increasing code releases from 3 to 35 per week.
- Partnered with the Head of Product to run company OKRs and hold teams accountable to quarterly goals.
Technical Advisor · Multiple Startups
Advised small companies on technical implementation and strategic direction.
Software Developer · Rackspace
Primary point of contact for the open-source Horizon/Heat integration for OpenStack.
Senior Software Engineer · The University of Texas at Austin
Primary architect of the Python/Django infrastructure housing all Provost Information Systems, and technical lead for every Provost-related application.
1 highlights
- Architected a faculty, student, and facilities reporting system that gave executive leadership data-driven analysis for decision-making; served as university-wide consultant for Python/Django adoption.
How I lead
Clear thinking first
The right amount of analysis is the key to making good decisions great. Too little and we quickly implement the wrong thing, too much and we lose trust in the process and speed of execution.
Judgment matters most
It depends, make space for nuance. Pressure test and question things. Build confidence in what needs to get done. Agents accelerate the implementation. Knowing what should be built is still the job.
Build empathy
Understanding each other and our users is the first step to building great software. Show your work, have the courage to dissent and the wisdom to accept another perspective.
Education
Software Developer Certification — The University of Texas at Austin
B.A. Psychology — The University of Texas at Austin